What does this perilous time of disease and destruction ask of us as readers and writers?
Three new books spotlight the power of the written word to foster creative responses to confinement and oppression — and to inspire deep change within us.
Azar Nafisi’s Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, Elena Ferrante’s In The Margins: On The Pleasures of Reading and Writing and Anna Quindlen’s Write for Your Life are all about the transformative possibilities that underlie political, social and personal crisis.
Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…
We take stock of the best rom-coms ever—from Coming to America to Groundhog Day to three Nora Ephron classics.
By Vanity Fair, May 11, 2022
Photo Illustration by Lauren Margit Jones; Photos, from left, by Sophie Giraud/Ifc/Kobal, from Castle Rock/Nelson/Columbia/Kobal, both from REX/Shutterstock; From Paramount/Everett Collection.
As this list of the best romantic comedies ever proves, the death of the genre has been greatly exaggerated. Yes, rom-coms have faltered in popularity since their 1990s heyday—but even as time passes, audiences are hungry as ever for banter, meet-cutes, and happy endings. That’s been clear for years now, since Netflix hit pay dirt by releasing scores of rom-coms, Crazy Rich Asians made bank at the box office, and Licorice Pizza became a critical darling.
Which got us thinking: what are the best romantic comedies of all time, the films that most perfectly exemplify this beloved but under-appreciated genre? Vanity Fair’s Hollywood team decided to find out by making individual top 10 lists, then crunching the numbers, noting which films appeared most frequently, and—after a few brief arguments about what constitutes a romantic comedy, and what does not—came up with the final tally.
Though 31 rom-coms ultimately made the list, 20 more were left off because they received only a single vote—films that ran the gamut from Obvious Child to White Christmas to Strictly Ballroom to Wall-E. The takeaway, perhaps, is that “romantic comedy” is an elastic designation, one that lies at least partly in the eye of the beholder—appropriate enough for a genre all about falling in love.
“Book bans are about limiting kids’ freedom to read and teachers’ freedom to teach”
By Kenny Stancil, Published May 12, 2022 5:00AM (EDT)
A big selection of books in English language are on sale, for example in the ‘Fantasy and Science Fiction’ section at the ‘English Bookshop’ of culture department store Dussmann in Berlin, Germany, 25 August 2016. More and more readers choose the original versions of the books in English. (Jens Kalaene/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The American Library Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and more than two dozen other organizations on Tuesday formed a coalition to fight the far-right’s record-breaking censorship barrage—wherein nearly 1,600 books were targeted for removal from public shelves and schools across the United States in 2021.
The goal of Unite Against Book Bans—which also includes the Authors Guild and prominent publishers such as Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster—is “to empower individuals and communities to fight censorship and protect the freedom to read,” according to the ALA.
“This is a dangerous time for readers and the public servants who provide access to reading materials,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said in a statement. “Readers, particularly students, are losing access to critical information, and librarians and teachers are under attack for doing their jobs.”
The setting of a book can play a massive role in its tone and memorability. The best authors can bring a place to life and make the story feel much more real because of it. That means that the choice of where to set a book is crucial.
Many authors simply set their books where they live, drawing on their day-to-day lives for inspiration. Others find locales that match the plot or feel of the story: noir set in California vs New York, for instance, account for two distinct subgenres.
So what are the states that draw in authors, and which ones are sorely lacking literary representation? You can place your guesses now (sheer population size is a good place to start), but Crossword Solver has done the work of tallying up all the U.S. location tags on Goodreads, so let’s dive into their results.
You must be logged in to post a comment.