#[ flint: THAT'S BECAUSE THE BOOK WAS WRITTEN UNDER THE ASSUMPTION THAT IT WOULD BE READ BY PEOPLE WHO KNEW

[intolerablexsacrifice]

@holmesdepot replied to your post ““Why does it have to be like this?” | Also Thomas, but with context of...”

the hilarious part about this is thomas is 100% the guy who would stick to the book instructions even with someone standing right beside him telling him not to do that so yup that is EXACTLY what happened here

i can’t believe flint is going to flick flour at him as punishment for thomas being a STUBBORN SHITHEAD

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Can thrillers really be feminist?

For The Pool

There is a dead woman. She is bloodied and battered. She’s probably naked, she’s almost definitely beautiful. A ruggedly handsome detective with a dark past stands over her and shakes his head at the sadness of it all. A steely look enters his eyes as he resolves to avenge this horrible waste of female flesh.

The above may read as sarcasm, but it’s an all too familiar opening for the crime genre. All stats seem to show that thrillers are overwhelmingly read by women and yet we still have to regularly negotiate the uncomfortable or downright problematic treatment of women and women’s bodies. But, increasingly, people are saying enough is enough. The team adapting Robert Galbraith/JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike books for TV have recently publicly criticised the “voyeuristic level of violence against women” in TV dramas. And, when it comes to books, there is an increasingly noisy collection of female characters wielding axes, cocktails and secrets, and an ever-deepening pool of writers questioning whether there’s another way to explore our darkest fears without having to sacrifice any feminist principles.

There’s still a strangely intense fascination with women who write crime and thrillers; still regular thinkpieces, even documentaries, where women writing about violence are treated a little like dogs walking on their hind legs. It smacks uncomfortably close to the rather Victorian belief that women couldn’t be surgeons because of their constitutions, as if dealing with blood coming out your vagina once a month would make you more, rather than less, squeamish. And, despite this, more and more male writers are writing under genderless or even outright female names. Author Martyn Waites describes the books he writes as himself as “more complex, more metaphorical, the kind of things things I like in writing” whereas (although it’s unclear if these are Waites or the journalist's words) when he writes as Tania Carver, the books are “simpler” and “more mainstream”.

Last year, Terrence Rafferty wrote a piece for The Atlantic called “Women Are Writing The Best Crime Novels”. The title of the article is deceptively positive and, among his praise for specific books, the piece is full of frustrating, patronising assumptions about female writers and readers. Even though it’s male writers choosing to write under female pseudonyms, apparently it’s “a bunch of very crafty girls” sneaking in, redefining the genre. On the subject of recent megahits like The Girl On The Train, Rafferty goes on to explain that “writers of the current school tend to favour a volatile mixture of higher-pitched first-person tones: hectoring, accusatory, self-justifying, a little desperate. Reading these tricky 21st-century thrillers can be like scrolling through an especially heated comments thread on a web site of wandering unaware into a Twitter feud”. Leaving aside that the horrors of comment threads or Twitter trolls are distinctly male-dominated, the language used here shows that, even very loosely masquerading as praise, there’s a deep discomfort with the way women have changed the crime and thriller market.

But, as with many things, peel away the layer of men making things weird (#notallmen) and you have a lot of women (and some men) getting on with actually interrogating what writing a feminist thriller really means. Erin Kelly’s latest book, He Said/She Said, revolves around a Ched Evans-esque rape trial, after a couple see what appears to be a sexual assault during an eclipse at a festival. The book grew from the idea of a crime taking place during an eclipse, not the desire to write a feminist thriller, but as Kelly says, “It must be feminist, because I’m getting emails from Men’s Rights Activists telling me that I’m a rabid man-hater.”

Kelly’s book explores sexual assault head-on; it’s at times a difficult book to read, but it shows that thrillers can tackle these things without slipping into gratuitous descriptions of violence against women. “The best thrillers don’t deny the female condition, but hit the sweet spot between exploiting real-life victims for cheap thrills and turning a novel into a morality play. I agonised over using an allegation of rape as a plot device,” Kelly says. “More so than I ever have when writing a murder. But for every sensitive, thoughtful examination of rape in fiction there are literally thousands of raped and murdered and mutilated women whose victimhood is little more than a plot device. I knew I was treading on eggshells, but I walked with incredible care. I researched this book more thoroughly than anything else I’ve ever written.”

Ruth Kenley-Letts, the executive producer for Strike, said “great efforts had been taken to treat the crimes against female victims with sensitivity on screen” and it’s something book editors are increasingly sensitive too as well. “It’s a tough one,” Sam Eades, a commissioning editor at Orion, says. “It’s important for fiction to reflect the society we live in – and violence against women happens to those we love and care abou – but that’s not to say I wouldn’t love to read a thriller that explored the world how it could be, not just as it is now.” Alison Hennessey, a commissioning editor for crime at Bloomsbury, has issued a blanket ban on books that start with the rape or murder or a woman being investigated by a male detective: “There are enough of these books out there already, and enough violence in the world, frankly, that I’m not interested in contributing more to that unless the book was doing something to explore why this happens.”

I can’t help but think of the people who defend the level of sexual violence in Game Of Thrones by saying it’s historically realistic, or that’s just what would have happened in a society like that, even though it’s a society where there is also magic and dragons. Art in whatever form is important because it lets us explore how we feel and react to the real world, and yet it is fiction – it does not have to do or be anything. But if fiction is where we explore life, thrillers are where we explore fear. They arguably don’t work if they’re not tense, uncomfortable reads. I had to stop reading He Said/She Said at several points to calm down, and I worked myself up into a righteous fury reading Little Deaths by Emma Flint – but at what was going on in the story, not because of the way the writer was handling it. “I don’t know a single woman who has never been made to feel threatened or afraid,” Flint says. “Our real-life experience gives an extra frisson of terror to reading about a woman being followed home, a woman who has a stranger sit next to her in an otherwise empty train carriage. We are used to being afraid that we will become victims.”

So, it’s not that these subjects shouldn’t be tackled in thrillers (as Kelly says, “I read this shit on my phone every day – not to explore it is just another kind of silencing”) – it’s how to skirt a very delicate line without tipping into gratuitous and exploitative presentations. How do you write a book about people doing awful misogynistic things without writing an awful misogynistic book? There’s no easy checklist of how to make a thriller feminist, and everyone has their own definition of what that means. But, as Kelly says: “I think any novel that makes the reader think seriously about the fact that women still cannot move through the world with the same ease as men can be read as feminist. Sometimes the authorial intent to write a feminist novel is clear, but with crime fiction it’s more of a Trojan horse. Big Little Lies arguably got more women examining their prejudices about domestic abuse than a Guardian editorial.”

Here are a few of our favourite feminist thrillers to try:

THE POWER BY NAOMI ALDERMAN It would be impossible to not mention the book that won this year’s Baileys Prize. A tense, blistering, darkly humorous look at what might happen if women suddenly became the physically stronger sex. It’s impossible to read it without interrogating your own perspective on gender.

LITTLE DEATHS BY EMMA FLINT A startlingly insightful, intelligent read about the way society closes its walls against women who are not what they are asked to be and the way the patriarchy is terrified by the women it cannot control, and how far it will go to reassert that control.

HE SAID/SHE SAID BY ERIN KELLY A pageturner that tackles sexual assault head-on. When a couple witness what seems to be a rape during an eclipse, they get embroiled in a court case and the lives of the two people affected. It always puts plot and character first, but isn’t afraid to interrogate how we decide who we believe and who to trust.

PULL ME UNDER BY KELLY LUCE Coming out next month, this scratches at the edge of the genre, as there is no trail of bodies or plot twists. Instead, it’s a tight, intense portrait of one woman’s psychological state as she tries to leave behind the legacy of a horrifying act she committed as a 12-year-old. A sharp literary read about guilt and anger.

OUT BY NATSUO KIRINO From one extreme to the other, this shocking, violent crime novel follows four female friends working together in a factory who band together to try and cover up the murder by one of them of their abusive husband, and things escalate from there. One for readers who like their biting feminist commentary with some dismemberment.

THE WOMAN WHO RAN BY SAM BAKER While it’s a little awkward to mention a book by the co-founder of the site, a list of feminist thriller recommendations would be incompletely without this modern take of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall. Not quite a retelling, but playing with Brontë’s themes of gossip, broken relationships and carving out your own identity.

[edc-creations-blog]

Interview with Don’t Read Me, Read A Book (DRMRAB)

Qiana Drennen is the founder and president of Don’t Read Me, Read A Book (DRMRAB), the fastest-growing book club in the United States. In a little over 2 years, DRMRAB has expanded from its humble beginnings as a Facebook Group, to chapters in 27 cities nationwide and 1 in the United Kingdom. In that short time, they were awarded the 2016 AAMBC Literary Award for Book Club of the Year, and were also recipients of a 2017 Black Excellence Award. Our members are not only avid readers, but they are also actively involved in their communities. Initiatives have included sending water to residents of Flint, Michigan, and helping underprivileged families with their back-to-school and Christmas needs.

DRMRAB members have earned the nickname, “The Paperback Gang,” due to their high level of participation at the many book festivals held throughout the year, and their voracious appetite for purchasing paperback books. Members are proud of their expansive bookshelves, many of which hold books with personal, handwritten notes and signatures from their favorite authors. Their motto is: “We are not just a book club, we are a movement.”

BPM: Please tell us about your book club, store, or blog! What is the name? Where are you located? QIANA: Don’t Read Me, Read A Book is based out of Columbus, Ohio, with chapters located throughout the United States and on Facebook. DRMRAB started online as a Facebook group in January 2015. I started the book club because I wanted my own group, instead of administering someone else’s. Fast forward to April of the same year, when I became acquainted with a couple of local readers and decided to start an in-person club that would meet once a month here in Columbus. A very good friend of mine, author Fabiola Joseph, suggested that I start offering readers in other cities a chance to organize under the DRMRAB umbrella. So, in February 2016, the first chapters began. Our Facebook membership has grown to over 2,000 members and our chapter members now total over 200 and growing! Our board consists of Vice President Terria Miller, Head Administrator Taheerah Brown, and Director of Charity and Volunteering Monica Redman.

BPM: What is the purpose for your organization? Does the name of the club/blog or store have a special meaning? QIANA: DRMRAB promotes literacy in the African-American community, while supporting authors in a positive, judgement-free environment. We stand out from other groups for a few reasons. First, our members support the authors we read by purchasing thousands of paperback books. With the popularity of eBooks, common thought was that paperbacks were dead until we came along and showed everyone how false that assumption was. Second, we host and participate in face-to-face discussions with authors, and you really don’t see that anymore. The name of our organization has a very special meaning to me. My favorite cousin (who passed away last year) helped me come up with the concept during a battle for my attention, while I was trying to read. That memory is so dear to my heart, that I give out a yearly award in his honor.

BPM: Tell us about your members. What is the demographic of your group? QIANA: Amazing! That’s the best way to describe the ladies and gentlemen of DRMRAB. We are more like a family, helping one another and staying in touch through all of the ups and downs of life. The main reason we’re amazing, is because we are already killing three Afro-American stereotypes.

1) “If you want to hide knowledge from a black person, put it in a book.” We’re a book club. 2) “Men surely don’t read.” We have a male chairman, as well as male chapter members. 3) “You can’t successfully put a large group of black women together in one place, at one time.” We have an all-chapter meetup at least twice each year.

We are open to anyone. DRMRAB has members from their early 20’s to late 70’s, male members, LGBT members, couples, Caucasians, lawyers, nurses, teachers, IT professionals, etc. With DRMRAB, the only demographic that matters is reading. We have a wide range of personalities who all mesh well together. Mostly everyone starts out shy, but quickly become comfortable when they join our DRMRAB family.

BPM: Can you share a few 5-star books that have expanded your horizons? QIANA: Yes, I’d love to. Pricey: Playing in Traffic because it’s really well written and shines line on a subject matter that really isn’t talked about which is human trafficking. Niya: Rainbow Dreams because it’s so much more than just a story about a lesbian rapper. It’s one of the most touching love and coming of a age stories about two young girls coming into their own. Both novels were written by Fabiola Joseph, and are must reads.

BPM: Do you have any words of wisdom for other readers who are in or who might want to start a book club? QIANA: When I decided to do this, I didn’t ask for guidance or advice. I had my own original ideas and didn’t want to water them down with someoneelse’s opinions or judgments. So, just like I would with any other business, I sat down and did my research and put my ideas into action. My advice is to thoroughly research the landscape and don’t just conform to what other clubs are doing. Hold onto your creative and original ideas, and strive to find that special “something” that will set your organization apart from others.

BPM: Do you primarily purchase books online or in a bookstore? Does the price of eBooks play a big part in the purchase? Would you ever stop buying printed books? QIANA: I love my paperbacks. I mean LOVE them. And I’m proud to say that 95% of DRMRAB members feel the same. Hence, our nickname The Paperback Gang. Most of our purchases are made directly from the author. We are also huge supporters of African American owned book stores Like Hood Book Headquarters (2407 E 7 mile, Detroit,Michigan). Michele Moore who is an Essence best selling author owns this store. It’s the hottest store around and they host the best book signing that we have ever attended. You will never see a Hood Book event without a member of DRMRAB in attendance. The price of an eBook doesn’t really matter, because we want that paperback. If the book is only available on eBook, then we don’t care about the price. If we want to read it, we’re going to read it. The day DRMRAB stops buying paperbacks will be the day that the world runs out of paper and ink.

BPM: What has the main focus become over the years? What legacy will your club or blog leave for those watching in the community? QIANA: Our main focus will continue to be shining the spotlight on African American authors. Why is this so important? Because there are so many unheard stories by great writers, and those stories must be heard. Rappers, singers, and actors get celebrated every day and I am adamant that writers must be equally recognized and celebrated. We will also continue to spotlight LGBT authors whenever possible. One of our friends (Richard) was a devoted activist in the LGBT community and we will carry that torch in his memory.

Legacy? DRMRAB will never die! Our living legacy will be the continued success of each author we read and the love of reading we foster with our members and their families.

BPM: When accepting members into the group, what are you looking for in a person? Has it been difficult to get people to join the group or to stay in the group? Do you have an online version of the group? QIANA: We look for avid, dedicated readers. I won’t lie and say that we haven’t lost members, but we certainly have gained more than we’ve lost. And, yes. We have a large online presence, with plenty of involvement from our DRMRAB members and of course our authors.

BPM: Do you host special events during the year or do you work for any charities? Do you get together as a group to socialize outside of your book club meetings? QIANA: Every year, every chapter gathers at Sistahs on Lit Book Festival in Silver Spring, MD. Papaya Wagstaff , who happens to be our DMV chapters chairman is the owner of this great event. S.O.L is amazing because it gives book clubs like DRMRAB a chance to mingle with fellow readers as well as different authors. It’s a weekend long event and i recommend that every book lover attends. Yes we also participate in several charities. When we first heard of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, we teamed up with Hood Books to send over 8,500 bottles of water to Flint’s residents.

In 2015, we adopted a family for Christmas, and in 2016 we adopted two families. We’ve also donated countless books to children. This year, we will also assist families with back-to-school and Christmas needs, among other initiatives. As far as hosting event every chapter host several authors throughout the year.

BPM: How can we follow you online? Do you have a website or social media pages? Website: http://www.drmrabbookclub.com Twitter: drmrabclub Instagram: drmrab_book_club Facebook: Don’t Read Me, Read A Book (The Reading Room) Snapchat: Drmrab club

    Qiana Drennen -Don’t Read Me, Read A Book (DRMRAB) Interview with Don't Read Me, Read A Book (DRMRAB) Qiana Drennen is the founder and president of Don't Read Me, Read A Book (DRMRAB), the fastest-growing book club in the United States.