Literary Journal
Written by Sara Leonard
Popular Victorian books have the honor of being reborn through new editions almost every year. While some can be stunning, others are a little problematic. Listed are some of the most sexist covers of popular Victorian books, in order from least to most repulsive.
Written by Carolina Eleni Theodoropoulos
Ursula K. Le Guin came into my life at the most formative time—not childhood or adolescence, but when I began to take writing seriously: in college. My first creative writing professor urged us to draw maps of our stories; “if you can’t visualize the space your characters inhabit, how will you show the reader?” On the projector, he put up maps from The Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and A Wizard of Earthsea. On the back page of my notebook I made a list: “Must Read.” To it, I added: Le Guin, Earthsea. Every workshop, this same professor brought books that reminded him of that day’s story and provided more worlds to inspire us. Earthsea popped up again, so I circled it on my list: it was time to read about Ged.
A couple of weeks ago, a LitHub article discussed the pros and cons of “Why It’s Ok to Reuse, Repurpose, and Recycle Fiction.” The article specifically focused on Sadia Shepard’s recently published short story “Foreign-Returned,” which plucks clear elements from Mavis Gallant’s 1963 short story “The Ice Wagon Going down the Street.” In an interview, Shepard said she owed a “great debt” to Gallant’s story, and that while Gallant’s story is about a family formerly from Geneva currently living in Canada who face financial struggles, she thought it felt “so Pakistani.” This was a clear inspiration for Shepard’s retelling of Gallant’s story.
Written by Kiran Gokal
With the growing awareness of diversity in books, and more importantly, accurate representations, the need for sensitivity readers has grown substantially. A sensitivity reader is pretty much exactly what you hear: they are readers who read to minimize sensitivity. The practice is done on a manuscript to eradicate any internalized bias, stereotyping, and language that can be offensive to marginalized groups that are represented in the text. Fortunately, it is becoming a crucial part in the process of today’s publishing industry. Alongside the kick-off of We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit organization aimed at supporting writers from marginalized groups and advocating for publishing of more diverse books, the publication numbers for books of this sort increased in 2014 to 28% after a decade of stagnation. Following incidents of backlash from readers of books with problematic portrayals, sensitivity readers became an increasingly normalized practice.
Written by Kylie Warkentin
I read Lynn Steger Strong’s piece, “Why I Wanted to Write About Anger,” on my phone in the small, suffocating apartment my grandmother owns. It feels less like a piece about anger, and more like what would result from a swell of resentment bitten off at the start once you’ve reminded yourself of glasses half full and your best friend’s good morning text. Strong describes her intent as “want[ing] to figure out what’s inside of all that anger” and “want[ing] to write about space and time and feeling like somehow, we’ve always had less of it than our male counterparts.” And I got it—I thought of Audrey Wollen’s Instagram post furiously and in all caps reminding male artists that “NOTHING DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU” and “GIRLS OWN THE VOID”; I thought of a statistic I had once read reporting that 58% of US women cried from feeling helpless as opposed to 23% of men; I thought of how I angrily purse my lips when I hear a whistle and how I clutch at the fabric of my pants when I hear tapping and I turn and inevitably it is a man; and I got it. As I clutched my obnoxiously large phone held in my clammy palm, I got it.
Written by Luis De La Cruz
“Where else in all of America are we so symbolized / As in this hall?”
–“The Congressional Library,” Amy Lowell
Sometimes, when I walk through the Perry-Castañeda Library, I’m reminded of some literary works that center on libraries and illuminate the library’s relationship to its faithful patrons. Charles Simic begins his poem “In the Library” with a reflection upon the old and unread books that live within a library: “There’s a book called / ‘A Dictionary of Angels.’ / No one has opened it in fifty years, / I know, because when I did, / The covers creaked, the pages / Crumbled.” (I’ve actually encountered a book entitled the Dictionary of Angels in the PCL—I don’t know if it was the same one as Simic’s—and I can attest that the book was quite old and had “angels and gods huddled” in it.) These books, which hold “great secrets,” go decades without use, gathering dust “on some shelf Miss Jones / Passes everyday on her rounds.” This representation of the library as a repository of arcane and esoteric knowledge isn’t necessarily incorrect; I certainly have had the experience of looking through the PCL stacks and wondering when the last time anyone has read a particular book—especially ones that look as though their knowledge might be outdated, or those that haven’t aged well. But despite their disuse, these books still inspire and inform today’s scholars and thinkers. Randall Jarrell, in his poem “A Girl in the Library,” imagines the library as a sacred space:
Written by Dan Kolinko
A rookie Marine gets stranded on a hostile planet during humanity’s space colonization as her suit runs out of power; two families escape over the Berlin Wall in a hot air balloon; a sociopath fights her way to the top of the fitness world with no broken bones spared; and a man spends his last few days with his post-apocalyptic, dog-sitting robot. These are just a few of the films topping this year’s Black List.
The Black List, an annual list of Hollywood’s top screenplays that have yet to be produced, was revealed this week. Biopics, World War II stories, women assassins, and abortion-rights dramas lead this year’s list. This year, twenty-five of the seventy-six scripts were written by women, an improvement from the previous average of only twelve.
Written by Kevin LaTorre
Sunday afternoon in the B. Iden Payne Theatre, UT’s Theatre and Dance Department closed The Drowsy Chaperone, its farcical tribute to musical theatre. To the south, across the bridge, the ZACH Theatre continues its run of the musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol until December 31. Live musicals are enduring flights of fancy for theatregoers, as the continued vibrancy of the theatre scenes in Austin, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and London can attest. These days, with the end of the semester nigh, and the holidays just around the corner, I’m feeling a little more reflective than usual. I’m even dreaming of a white Christmas (for one brief Thursday night only!). So, sifting through the long-standing connection between literature and musicals seems appropriate, and finding any explanation may satisfy both my curiosity and procrastination.
Written by Kylie Warkentin
The Grownup only had me reaching for the nearest bottle of hand sanitizer after I finished reading, which is a big step up from most of Gillian Flynn’s works. The Grownup tells the tale of a sex-working palm reader and mousy divorced mother with a slightly-off child. There was nothing too grisly in the story, and nothing that made me want to throw my book into the face of the nearest man. Nice!
If you felt gross reading Gone Girl, you sympathized too much with Nick Dunne. If you (like me) felt only a little gross after reading, you might have identified too much with Amy, and may or may not have several forms of memorabilia to commemorate that fact. Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl only wants to exfoliate her body after reading this, not take a long bath.
This is a controversial placement, but Sharp Objects only made me want to take a quick shower after reading. I definitely felt gross: it’s a story about a reporter—who (trigger warning) carves words into her skin—returning to her hometown to investigate the murders of two preteen girls. But it was not super gross. If anything, it just made me really, really sad.
Dark Places follows Libby Day, the only survivor (save the brother she accused) from the night her family was massacred, as she—by revisiting the night of her family’s death—stumbles to the attention of another killer. Arguably the goriest work of Flynn’s extremely disturbing repertoire, Dark Places did not leave me with a happy feeling, but it did definitely make me want to take a quick dip into a pool of bleach.
Written by Carolina Eleni Theodoropoulos
Jac Jemc’s new novel, The Grip of It, is a story of a haunted house and the couple within it. At her reading during the Texas Book Festival, Jemc spoke about using the haunted house trope as a metaphor for the couple’s deeply rooted problems. The more they are disturbed by the unknown of the house and its surrounding area, the more is revealed of the dysfunction of their relationship.
Written by Katelyn Connolly
In her Twitter bio, Hope Ewing describes herself as a “drink pusher, writer. Not necessarily in that order.” Fittingly, in a recent article written for Literary Hub, she explores the relationship between art and alcohol abuse, an issue that hits close to home for many artists and members of creative communities. In Ewing’s case, the problem of alcoholism exists generally in her family. Yet her admission that “stories of epic blacked-out shenanigans…were so normalized in my childhood that they seemed like common rites of passage,” rings eerily true for social scenes crafted by artists, as well. Writers, painters, musicians and film-makers have historically existed in worlds where drinking and drug use are regarded as more acceptable than they might be in other circles. Artists often seek to be deviants, and deviant behaviors become par for the course. Addiction is normalized under the banner of Art.
Written by Caitlin Smith
This past week, managing editor Julia Schoos and I had the opportunity to sit down with David Kornhaber, an Associate Professor in the English Department and Comparative Literature graduate advisor, to talk about his current research.
Hothouse 