Boys, Books and Bildungsroman

Yesterday, there was a really interesting article in the NY Forward that featured, SELFLESS, the new book by my client, David Slater.

Here's an excerpt:

"It turned out that getting ready for the birth of my elder daughter I’d missed the furor surrounding Ian McEwan article to which Shteyngart’s comment referred. In it McEwan had concluded “when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.” His conclusion was based on a mishmash of statistics and anecdotes (most notably his inability to give away excellent free books to men in central London). But the reductive truth of it seems based on the notion that stories are for girls and facts are for boys.

I find terribly sad the idea that people would not want to read roughly in accordance to their ability. Reading is how we learn to imagine others — not the outcomes of the plot, but how characters, events and language flow around each other: how other people exist. Novels expose you to new people, worlds and aspects of worlds. Reading a good novel though is not about its internal facts, but their apprehension and representation by the author: If you read “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” for Catholic theology or Irish history, you are missing the point."

Check it out!