I hope I’ll have more to say soon, but for now here is a threesome of interesting links:
At the Bookview Café, Sherwood Smith discusses the trend towards ever darker and more violent fantasy and wonders what the appeal of torture porn is.
Talking of depressing, forced pregnancy seems to be the latest trend in dystopian young adult fiction, as this article at Slate suggests. The link to the current political discussion in the US is pretty obvious, just as the entire teen dystopia genre is an expression of current economic and political anxieties in the US, which is why those books don’t do nearly as well in Germany. By the way, I found it interesting that one of the dystopian YA novels in the article was written by a man.
Also at Slate, Sady Doyle reviews Looking for Mr Goodbar, a novel from 1975 which makes the gender politics of Fifty Shades of Grey look positively progressive by comparison. Basically, it’s about a young woman who has casual sex with men she picks up in bars and is then brutally murdered. Because having sex with multiple men and outside marriage must inevitably lead to death, don’t you know?
sending...