【Covet: Island of Desire】

Nudity Defended,Covet: Island of Desire and Other News

By Dan Piepenbring

On the Shelf

Giovanni_Giacometti_(1868_-_1933)_Theodora,_1914

Giovanni Giacometti, Theodora, 1914, oil on canvas.

  • The return of Girlsalso means the return of prudish, puzzled critics. As a riposte, six reasons (just six?) that female nudity can be powerful when it’s not sexual.
  • What if classic novels were “whorishly titled, optimizing our search engines rather than our imaginations”? (Jane Eyreis a personal favorite: “This Guy Didn’t Tell His Governess About His Secret Ex-Wife in the Attic. What Happened Next Really Burned Him Up.”)
  • Fiction in translation is on the rise.
  • The British Library’s new exhibition of comic books aims to inspire children to be “naughtier and more rebellious.” Embrace obscenity, kids. Do not eat your spinach. Kill all fascists.
  • We live in a time of ever more florid author bios—here are three questions a good bio should answer. (Spoiler: one of them is “Who are you?”)
  • Parsing punctuation in Internet initialisms: Is the semicolon in “tl;dr” ironic?

 

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