Books
Romantasy allegations
Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story? | The New Yorker | Read article
A copyright theft lawsuit offers the narrative impulse for Katy Waldman’s exploration of romantasy books, but it’s the mechanics of the industry that were most compelling to me.
There are the incredibly specific sub-genres:
a “cheese-shifter” paranormal romance, by the author Ellen Mint, in which characters can turn into different types of cheese.
The way these genres and their tropes are codified for both publishers and customers:
Entangled, “Crave” ’s publisher, gives visitors to its Web site the option to browse its selection by tropes such as “enemies-to-lovers” and “marriage of convenience.” Entangled editors fill out a form for every work they acquire; on the version of the form I viewed, there were fields in which to specify “tropes,” “paranormal elements,” “authors similar to,” “Heat level” (on a five-point scale from “mild” to “scorcher”), and the ratio of romance to suspense (from a maximum of 100/0 to a minimum of 20/80).
Some striking excerpts directly from romantasy works:
One novel memorably features a hunky physician’s assistant who pleasures the heroine as “a brigade of ghostly rainbows jostled in the northern sky.”
And the story provides a broader perspective on the consequences of algorithm-driven platforms for the publishing industry:
Because Amazon’s search algorithm appears to favor writers with larger backlists, there’s an incentive to flood the platform with titles—and to pad those titles with as many pages as possible, as Kindle Unlimited distributes royalties to the creators with the highest number of pages read. . (This has spawned an epidemic of “page-stuffing,” in which authors load their novels with bonus material; authors have also been accused of using bots to artificially inflate their reader tally.)
Film
The constant reinvention of Agnès Varda
Le Paris d’Agnès Varda de-ci, de-là | Musée Carnavalet, Paris until 24th August 2025 | Visit exhibition website, Read review
Filmmaker Profile: Agnès Varda | Academy Museum of Motion Pictures | Watch documentary
An exhibition of the photography of Agnès Varda in Paris provides a snapshot of her early creative output, which would also span documentary, film, and art.
She was a contemporary of Truffaut and other filmmakers associated with the French New Wave, but her influence extended well beyond that period. Martin Scorsese is a notable advocate of her work, and after her death, spoke at length about her impact, describing her as “a wonder to me, reinventing constantly.”
This brisk documentary profile tells the story of her life and work and, in large part because it is entirely narrated by her, it is a delight.
In it, she shares her vision of what film can offer us*:
When you make films, when you create something, you’re confronting questions that you yourself have. Films don’t provide answers, but they are a means for grappling with the questions, to understand the relationships we have with the world, and with one another.
Books
An interview with Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Art of Fiction No. 120 | The Paris Review | Read interview (from 1990)
Mario Vargas Llosa, giant of world literature | Financial Times | Visit website
Why did he turn? | London Review of Books | Read article
The death this month of Mario Vargas Llosa led to a flurry of coverage and retrospectives of his work.
The Paris Review made their Art of Fiction interview with him available for access without a subscription. The interview covers events from his life, his approach to his work, and the interactions between art and politics (in addition to being a novelist and journalist, he was a politician whose career culminated in an unsuccessful run for the Peruvian presidency in 1990).
He shares memories of Neruda and Borges:
Neruda adored life. He was wild about everything—painting, art in general, books, rare editions, food, drink. Eating and drinking were almost a mystical experience for him. A wonderfully likable man, full of vitality—if you forget his poems in praise of Stalin, of course. He lived in a near-feudal world, where everything led to his rejoicing, his sweet-toothed exuberance for life. I had the good fortune to spend a weekend on Isla Negra. It was wonderful! A kind of social machinery worked around him: hordes of people who cooked and worked—and always quantities of guests. It was a very funny society, extraordinarily alive, without the slightest trace of intellectualism. Neruda was exactly the opposite of Borges, the man who appeared never to drink, smoke, or eat, who one would have said had never made love, for whom all these things seemed completely secondary, and if he had done them it was out of politeness and nothing more. That’s because ideas, reading, reflection, and creation were his life, the purely cerebral life. Neruda comes out of the Jorge Amado and Rafael Alberti tradition that says literature is generated by a sensual experience of life.
He speaks to the process of developing a story and becoming “a cannibal of reality”:
When I reach the heart of a story I’ve been working on for some time, then, yes, something does happen. The story ceases to be cold, unrelated to me. On the contrary, it becomes so alive, so important that everything I experience exists only in relation to what I’m writing. Everything I hear, see, read seems in one way or another to help my work. I become a kind of cannibal of reality.
And on politics and literature he is clear on which practice has more longevity:
We must remember that political action is rather ephemeral whereas literature is in for the duration. You don’t write a book for the present day; in order for a work to exert influence over the future, time must play its role, which is never or rarely the case for political actions. However, even as I say this, I never stop passing judgments on the political climate or implicating myself by what I write and what I do. I believe that a writer cannot avoid political involvement, especially in countries like mine where the problems are difficult and the economic and social situation often has dramatic aspects. It’s very important that writers act in one way or another, by offering criticism, ideas, by using their imagination in order to contribute to the solution of the problems.
To complement this interview, the Financial Times collection containing their obituary along with reviews and interviews from their archive provides valuable context, while Tony Wood’s short essay in the London Review of Books asks why Vargas Llosa went from the left to the right of the political spectrum over the course of his career.