- Tayari Jones, novelist and professor at the Rutgers-Newark MFA program, writes about "The Black Southerner's Dilemma" on her blog today, prompted by Janet Maslin's New York Times review of The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Tayari's post is passionate, thoughtful and challenging. She concludes, "I can't decide which pushes my buttons more: southern racism or northern delight in pointing it out." Required reading.
- This interview with Rutgers-Newark English professor Barbara Foley is way too academic for me, and to tell the truth it lost me about a third of the way in. But the fact that there are radical academics researching and writing about working-class literature is welcome news to me--for which I thank novelist and teacher Meredith Sue Willis, who's much taken with Foley's book on proletarian literature Radical Representations. In the interview, Foley refers to a book whose title I recognized because I picked it up a couple years ago and have had it on my to-read pile ever since: The Cultural Front by Michael Denning. Maybe I'll give it a shot soon.
