California Literary Review

Know literature, know the world: A team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics claim that stories and their writers can do just as much as academics and policy researchers, perhaps even more, to explain and communicate the world’s problems. Fiction, they boldly venture, can be just as useful as fact. [Guardian]

Rewriting the book on profitable publishing: Your typical Silicon Valley startup is run by a rarely washed teenager with borderline Asperger’s Syndrome, who’s never heard of profit but wants to sell for billions, right? That makes Blurb very atypical. Eileen Gittins, its chief executive, is female, for a start; and stylish. [Guardian]

‘The Joy Luck Club’ takes to the stage in L.A.: “In terms of theater, it is really complicated,” says Susan Kim, who turned “The Joy Luck Club” into a play more than a decade ago. “It has challenges structurally because so much of it is ’states of mind.’ What’s effective in the book fights against the way a play works. [LA Times]

What to read when you’re… jealous: Everyone knows to beware the green-eyed monster that doth make you sick, but it’s easier said than done when you are eaten up inside with jealousy. The best remedy, in my experience, is to re-read Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, which is a like-for-like cure. [Telegraph]

Why don’t women write ‘Big Ideas Books?’: Greer summarised books such as Gladwell’s as “books about ‘big ideas’, and described their authors, collectively: “His maleness resounds from every monomaniacal sentence. There is no answer to everything, and only a deluded male would spend his life trying to find it.” Women, she said, are too sensible to try to write such broad-sweep theses. [Independent]