- ‘Tubercular nymphomaniacs, exhibitionists, voyeurs, orgies, gender bending, bondage, bestiality, incest, hermaphroditism’– Anaïs Nin has long been known for her taboo-breaking erotica. This year, Sky Blue Press publishes Aurelis, a newly discovered ‘porntopia’, lost to the public for decades. ‘If Delta of Venus is Nin 101,’ writes Laura Frost, ‘Auletris is Advanced Nin’ – a ‘treasure trove of polymorphous perversity’ · LARB
- Love Emily Dickinson? You can now rent out Dickinson’s bedroom as office space for a mere $100/hour. ‘Whether you are a writer, an artist, a composer, or a poet, you’ll find solace and inspiration for your artistic output in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom.’ A small table and chair will be provided, and before you ask, ‘laptops and power cords are welcome.’ Woolf’s room, Hemingway’s bottle, Joyce’s desk. ‘Here’s What I Hate About Writers’ Houses’ writes April Bernard, the idea that ‘art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer’ · emilydickinsonmuseum.org and NYRB
- In his 1955 story ‘Franchise’, Isaac Asimov imagined a future in which a supercomputer decides the US Presidential election by interviewing one citizen:
‘You see, Linda, till about forty years ago, everybody always voted. Say we wanted to decide who was to be the new President of the United States. The Democrats and Republicans would both nominate someone, and everybody would say who they wanted. When Election Day was over, they would count how many people wanted the Democrat and how many wanted the Republican. Whoever had more votes was elected. You see?’
Linda nodded and said, ‘How did all the people know who to vote for? Did Multivac tell them?’
Matthew’s eyebrows hunched down and he looked severe. ‘They just used their own judgment.’
Mel Stuart’s proto-Siri supercomputer in Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
- Next year, Granta Books publishes Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? A collection of stories by the late Kathleen Collins – civil rights activist, author and film director, whose 1982 film, Losing Ground, was one of the first feature films written and directed by a black woman. Sadly, Collins never achieved prominent success in her lifetime. Richard Brody describes this invisibility as ‘until now . . . a grievous loss to literature’. You can read the title story, set in 1963, ‘The year of race-creed-colour blindness’, on our website · New Yorker and Granta
- In 2012, Jonathan Franzen called Twitter ‘the ultimate irresponsible medium’ – ‘Serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.’ In fact, according to Tara Isabella Burton, that’s exactly what serious writers have done since at least the nineteenth century, when shaping one’s identity was ‘an act of creative resistance to a culture increasingly suffused with mass production and consumerism’. As Charles Baudelaire put it, what was needed was ‘a personal originality, bounded only by the limits of the proprieties . . . a kind of cult of the self’ · Guardian and Real Life
