Posted by Nick Curley Scrolling lists with eye-popping headlines are the mango-on-the-stick of the fruit vending cart that is literary journalism. “T.S. Eliot’s Ten Girthiest Erections”. “Grad Programs in Order of Proximity to Good Burritos”. “Super Starred: The Coolest Footnotes of All Time”. And those are just the freebies that I’m firing off at will! Pop culture countdowns are notorious among bloggers for their ability to rack up that handful of extra Web 2.0 followers that will pull us all […]
Indexing: Eugene Marten, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Twin Peaks, The Atlantic, and More!
Tobias Carroll Earlier in the week, I read Eugene Marten’s novel Waste, which I’d been meaning to read for a while now. It starts out reading like a case study in modern urban alienation: the protagonist works as a janitor, and seems estranged from nearly everyone around him. And then things get progressively more unsettling — one late-in-the-book scene features one of the most grotesque moments I’ve encountered in a nominally realistic novel. A day or two later, I found that moments […]
Everything I Needed to Know About the Publishing Industry Circa 2010 I Learned From an Article in The Atlantic
Posted by Jason Diamond That’s not 100% accurate, but the Chris Jackson piece titled “All the Sad Young Literary Women” seems like a good roundup of a lot of things people are afraid of/that’s wrong with publishing, and also utilizes the term “bookopalypse”.
Fiction Returns to The Atlantic
Over at The Faster Times, Lincoln Michel reports the good news: The Atlantic has a long history of publishing high quality fiction dating all the way back to its launch in 1857. It wasn’t so long ago that it was The Atlantic, New Yorker and Harper’s that were the big three. But five years ago The Atlantic pulled fiction from its subscriber pages, only publishing short stories in a special newsstand issue each summer. However, The Atlantic is bringing short fiction back […]
Bites: Polish Crime Covers, Lit in the 00’s, David Foster Wallace, Pacino as Shylock, and More
Over at The Rumpus, we learn that Poland just knows how to do sweet cover art for their crime novels. At New York Magazine, Sam Anderson rips into the 00’s. Appearances by David Foster Wallace, Junot Díaz. Bolaño, Eggers, P.G. Wodehouse, Borges, and Wilde. A nod to N+1, a short drive into Kindle territory, and then ends by again talking about the same book that started him on the whole conversation: Infinite Jest. Most of the book’s action […]
Bites: L Mag Dislikes Tao Lin, Depressing Books, Rewrite of The Prince, the Polanski Problem, Chicago, Ahmadinejad, Conde Nast, and more
L Magazine wouldn’t like Tao Lin. Apparently only two people came to one of Lin’s readings at a bookstore in California, and the tiny magazine rejoiced. To contrast, here is what Vol. 1 has said about Lin’s latest novel and publishing imprint. Lit. The Top 10 Most Depressing Books. Another list, The National Book Foundation’s “Top 5 Under 35.” The Millions has a charming essay about one writer’s experience at an artist’s retreat in Wyoming. The Millions, also, interviewed Tao […]