DWL Lit Bites is DWL Blog’s weekly roundup of literary news. Send us your suggestions on Facebook, tweet at us @desi_writers or leave a comment!

It is another week and I am back with a roundup of all things literary. This week we have the most epic friend-zoning letter from our feminist love Charlotte Brontë, and when books incept other books within their pages. Enjoy!

1. Rejecting marriage proposals is something that is part of the South Asian package so it is nice when a literary giant puts that feeling into words. The 19th Century English novelist Charlotte Brontë was always a master wordsmith and that made writing beautiful rejection letters pretty easy for her. This specimen is “a bold defiance of oppressive gender ideals, packaged as the ultimate it’s-not-you-it’s-me gentle letdown.”

2. Don’t you just love it when books mention other books and make you want to read them? This happened to me regarding Jane Eyre (it was mentioned in The Princess Diaries, don’t judge) and Reading Lolita in Tehran. At Ploughshares, Clare Beams breaks down the act of reading a book in which a character is also reading.

3. Donna Tartt won the Pulitzer in 2014 for her novel, The Goldfinch. Recently her 1986 speech to her graduating class at Bennington College was unearthed. At the time of giving the speech, she had already started work on her first novel, which made her burst on to the literary scene. That debut book, The Secret History (1992), is a campus novel that bound her identity with Bennington.