Potboilers, fantasy lands, murders, noir triumphs, supernatural creatures, and the twisted, thrilling, and dark imaginations that devise them are hardly a male-only literary province. Since Mary Shelley imagined Frankenstein on a night in Switzerland, women have been creating genre fiction alongside men, playing with vampires, dragons, detectives, unreliable narrators, and denizens of outer space. So pack some of these classic genre novels by women in your canvas tote and enjoy reading them this summer at the beach, the pool, or just snuggled up to your air conditioning unit. READ MORE: Genre Books by Women Authors | Flavorwire.
Harvard’s flagship library, Widener, is an imposing granite cube built quite literally as shrine to the book. A central alcove cuts through the stacks to show off a prized relic: an original Gutenberg bible. But this is not the heart of Harvard’s libraries. No, that would be its cold storage site, an anonymous concrete building few students or even faculty know about.
The Harvard Depository, some 30 miles from the Cambridge campus, better resembles an Amazon warehouse than a library. The 200,000 square foot facility houses the vast majority of Harvard Library’s collection—some 9 million books, films, LPs, magnetic tapes, and pamphlets sorted not by the Dewey decimal system but by size.
A fascinating new interactive documentary, Cold Storage, glimpses inside this little-known world.
I absolutely love subscription boxes. They’re like Christmas every month, and if you choose a good one, you’ll always be excited to see that box on your doorstep. In this post, I’ll be looking at 10 that would make great gifts for librarians.
When a young woman in New Delhi, India, was brutally gang-raped on a bus in December 2012, making international headlines, Ram Devineni wasn’t going to stay silent. The filmmaker and artist marched in the streets alongside other protesters, calling for swift justice and systemic change to the all-too-common violence against women that plagues the country.
When he asked a Delhi police officer what he thought about the young woman’s assault, the officer told him, “No good girl walks home alone at night,” implying that she either provoked the rape or, worse, deserved it. His words reflected the misguided, patriarchal view that permeates much of Indian society, silencing women even further with social stigma.
“I realized at that moment that this was not a legal issue, but a cultural problem,” Devineni tells Mashable. “As a filmmaker and as an artist, I wanted to really address this in a cultural context.”
That’s why, two years later, he created and directed the transmedia comic book Priya’s Shakti — a story about the titular Priya, a gang-rape survivor-turned-superhero who partners with a Hindu goddess to fight sexual violence and challenge the patriarchy.
Co-written by Vikas K. Menon with artwork by Dan Goldman, the comic book is the first of its kind to use augmented reality and image recognition, using various media to tell the story of fighting back against sexual assault.
The one struggle of being a woman who reads is that you want to read everything. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by bestseller lists , because there just isn’t enough time in the day to read every hot new book. Between near-constant recommendations of amazing memoirs, new sequels and a terrifyingly long list of bookmarked Internet longreads, it can be stressful to choose what you should pick up next. Knowing which classics you’re missing from your reading repertoire is easy — it’s a little harder to remember what you’ve missed from three years ago.
We’ve done a little bit of the hard work for you (or maybe just increased your book stress… sorry) by pulling together a list of incredible titles from the past few years that you should add to the pile on your bedside table. These books by women are just a few of the incredible titles published recently — an exhaustive list would be hundreds of books longer. Those listed here are some of the most-discussed, thought-provoking and life-changing books from a diverse group of women writers. They make you rethink what being a feminist means, offer life advice to women of all ages, and reinforce your long-held belief that Tina and Amy should be your best friends and life coaches forever. The novels are some of the finest writing from woman authors. From lighthearted memoirs to harrowing thrillers, there’s a genre here for everyone.
It’s a truism to say that Hollywood is a boy’s club but Dr. Stacy L. Smith of the University of Southern California put this saying into stark, empirical terms: a mere 4.4% of the top 100 box-office releases in the USA were directed by women. That’s it. It’s a percentage that should be used to describe the amount of cream in whole milk, not half the human race.
The truth is that the film industry in general, not just Hollywood, is dominated by men. In books on cinema and classes on film history, female directors frequently get overlooked.
Over at MUBI, someone aptly named Ally the Listmaker has taken great pains to counter that. She has compiled an exhaustive collection of movies by women. Ally’s list contains over 1400 movie titles, mostly films made within the past 20 years.
In March, a group of New York library officials released a statement declaring that a “staggering infrastructure crisis” has crept up on the city’s public library system. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, one branch is “routinely forced to close on hot days” due to problems with air conditioning. Others are plagued with water-damaged books and facilities that are too small to accommodate everyone in their community.
General interest public libraries are no less necessary than they were in 1901, when Andrew Carnegie donated the equivalent of $147 million to construct 65 of them across New York City, but their focus is increasingly shifting away from books and toward things like English classes, job training workshops, community meeting spaces, or just places to read the news online for those without internet access.
While the public must continue to fight for these more practical resources, a number of oddball independent libraries cropping up around the North American continent offer an experience that can’t be found in their traditional counterparts. These boutique libraries are working to stretch our very idea about the word “library,” creating a real living community around the often very lonely act of reading.
In Indonesia, one man and his horse have created a walking, braying mobile library to bring books to the remote villages on Java island.
Ridwan Sururi, 42, travels between schools and villages with a tamed wild-horse called Luna who is loaded with boxes of donated books. Sururi named his project Kudapustaka, meaning ‘horse library’ in Indonesian, according to the BBC.
Back in March, Fox confirmed that FBI agents Mulder and Scully would return to television, and now we know when. The network announced that The X-Files six-episode run will begin on January 24th at 10 PM ET, following the NFL’s NFC Championship Game. There’s sure to be a load of interested viewers already marking down the date, but Fox is looking to rope in a few more by debuting the miniseries right after a big playoff game. The show’s premiere is a two-night event with the second episode following on Monday, January 25th at 8 PM ET in what will be the regular time slot. If you’ll recall, show creator Chris Carter will handle director and executive producer duties while David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprise their roles as the Bureau’s paranormal investigating duo.
Last month, a microbiology lab in Nottingham, England made international headlines when it unearthed a substance that kills methicillin-resistant staph, one of the deadliest superbugs of modern times. The most astounding part about the find? It was a 1,000-year-old Viking potion. “This is something we never, ever expected,” said Christina Lee, the Viking scholar at the University of Nottingham who translated the recipe from Old English. “When this tested positive against MRSA, we were just bowled over.”
Bald’s eye salve, intended to vanquish a stye, was discovered in Bald’s Leechbook, an Old English medical primer that hails from 9th century England. The recipe, which claimed to be “the best leechdom” in existence, caught the eye of Freya Harrison, a microbiologist at the University of Nottingham who moonlights as an Anglo-Saxon warrior on the weekends, as a member of the UK’s oldest and largest Viking reenactment society.
“This all kinda started from me being a big nerd,” Harrison told me over Skype. “When I met Christina, she was eager to talk with a microbiologist, because she has an interest in the history of infection. One of the things she had always wanted to do was test some of these medieval remedies out, to see whether they actually work.”
Together with microbiologist Steve Diggle, the three pooled resources to begin the “AncientBiotics” project, which would identify promising Anglo-Saxon remedies and test their medicinal value using modern science. They never expected their first attempt at replicating a medieval potion would be such a roaring success.
“To be honest, I didn’t think anything would come of this,” Diggle, whose interests lie in bacterial communication and evolution, told me over Skype. “For me, one of the most interesting aspects is asking whether this was a true scientific attempt at a recipe for treating an infection. If so, that completely changes our perspective on Anglo-Saxon medicine.”
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