Tuesday's Literary Briefing

Where Men Do Their Best Reading

It’s the Tuesday after our birthday. Mentioning that is strange to us because it’s just another day, after all. Another day where we tend to avoid human interaction. Maybe more so because we have to mumble sheepish “thank yous” for all the birthday greetings. Then again, we just told you it was our birthday, so obviously we want some acknowledgment, right? Or maybe we’re just looking to fill this space. Nevertheless, we are further into manhood. Hear our roar! There are many places to learn how to be a man, but as we are of the literary ilk, we’re all for finding your inner masculinity in the books of your childhood. If you’re looking to publish, look to Dark Sky. As you may have noticed on Friday, submissions are open again! If you’re looking to publish and make big bucks, you should get familiar with Jonathan Galassi, the big man at FSG. While we’re on big men (and masculine women), Helen Hackett has a new book on the cultural relationship between Elizabeth I and Shakespeare. It takes a man to rebel, a whole bunch of men, especially against the Confederacy in Civil War-era Mississippi. Paul Hemphill knew of the struggles of contradiction in the South. There’s fighting going on there and in Katherine Dunn’s passion, the manly sport of boxing. Finally, in case you missed it, few men watch Oprah and fewer want their books on her list. — Andrew Geer

– When I was growing up, our house backed onto woods, a thin two-acre remnant of a once-mighty wilderness. This was in a Maryland city where the enlightened planners had provided a number of such lingering swaths of green. They were tame as can be, our woods, and yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. — Manhood in Children’s Literature in The New York Review of Books

– If you’re anything like the writers I meet at conferences and MFA programs, the word sweet probably isn’t the first adjective that comes to mind when you think of the head of a major New York publishing house. I hear a lot of other words (many of them unprintable in a wholesome writer’s magazine), but the takeaway is often the same: They are snakes in suits whose only loyalty is to the bottom line. While it’s true that such creatures exist—I could tell you stories—they are far less common than you might think. — Jonathan Galassi in Poets and Writers

The House of Theater's Man

– History remembers a few figures from diverse spheres of activity. Perhaps as a memory aid, we like to think of all those in a given period as being chums, members of a sort of canonic club. So although there is no historical evidence of Elizabeth I meeting Shakespeare, the idea of such a meeting, indeed on a relaxed and regular basis, proved over time integral to common conceptions of both. — Elizabeth I and Shakespeare in Literary Review

– The idea is beguiling: a ­region in the South during the Civil War where the inhabitants, disgusted by slavery and unwilling to support the Confederate cause, take up arms as Union loyalists. Better still, for storytelling purposes, would be a charismatic leader who organizes the resistance. — The State of Jones in The Wall Street Journal

The Game of Ancient Men

– Katherine Dunn has a new book out. That’s not something one gets to say terribly often. The book, entitled One Ring Circus, is a collection of her musings on boxing. Many people don’t know that in addition to being a wonderfully inventive fiction writer, Dunn is an award-winning chronicler of fisticuffs. — Katherine Dunn in Guernica

– Paul Hemphill, who brought a lean journalistic style and a sharp ear for dialogue to essays and novels devoted to the blue-collar South of stock-car racing, football, country music, evangelists and wayward souls, died Saturday morning in Atlanta. He was 73. — Paul Hemphill in the New York Times

– After The Corrections was selected by Oprah for her book club, Jonathan Franzen said some ill-considered things. He worried aloud that the Oprah logo would taint his book with corporatism, tag it as middle-brow and scare off male readers. The result was that Ms. Winfrey gently rescinded her offer that Franzen appear on her show, and certain literati indulged their schadenfreude in the pages of the New York Times. — The Corrections in In These Times