This week the Intrepid Intern is helping you almost get it kind of together with a handy personality quiz. The Girls/Sex and the City comparisons have been done to death, but where are the parallels between Dunham et al. and literature’s other famous female quartet: Louise May Alcott’s Little Women?
Read MoreWrite This Book! is a series in which Julia Langbein describes a book that does not exist — yet. Today, she urges you to retell the story of Gerard Depardieu's "defection" to Russia in the soul-stirring, door-busting style of Mitch Albom.
Read MoreMy identical twin sister and I have had our fair share of invented languages and supernatural mind-melds, but we've got nothing on the legendary pairs presented here — each one embodying a common perception that we twins spend our lives embracing or dreading.
Read MoreIf brevity is truly the soul of wit, then your Twitter feed is the Algonquin round table of today's digital Dorothy Parkers and Ogden Nashes. Here's a selection of our favorite tweets from the week; nominate yours by submitting to @blackballoonpub with #twitwit.
Read MoreReading Ali Smith's new book Artful, at once a series of real-life Oxford lectures and a metafictional post-love story, I felt compelled to make a list of her countless references to art and literature. Here are nine of them — nine piercing observations that also articulate the book's romantic arc.
Read MoreEveryone from Galileo to Jim Morrison to countless Scrabble wordsmiths have played around with letters to form their perfect anagrams. We take literary-minded words and anagram them to find ... well, that's up to you. A deeper meaning? A hidden truth? Or just a happy coincidence?
Read MoreI was completely absorbed in the latest Anna Karenina — until the blond, curly-haired girlyman Vronsky showed up. Like just about everybody, I've had my loves and frustrations with the film versions of beloved books. Let me share some of them with you.
Read MoreA weekly series that celebrates everyone’s favorite part of the author
reading: the Q&A. This week, John Green and Neil Gaiman impart some advice onto aspiring novelists.
Female stereotypes have gotten a lot more involved since the days of dumb blonde jokes. As a testament to women the world over who choose to define femininity on their own terms, we present you with an alphabetical list of 26 female subcultures.
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