Are you lover or writer of florid longwinded codswollop? The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest might be for you.
Sublimely Bad?
“Qualities other than introspection”
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Barnes and Noble’s Black Friday Plan
Today is the much-discussed Black Friday, and Barnes and Noble has recruited prominent authors including Donna Tartt and David Mitchell to help raise holiday sales. The plan? To sell roughly 500,000 signed books.
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Why Publishers Matter
A memo leaked from within Hachette Book Group can be read as a publisher’s manifesto, or an overview of why publishers and editors are still relevant. Maybe we can incorporate this into Edan’s reasons not to self-publish this year.
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Posthumous Praise
“The female writers whose work has most recently come in for enthusiastic appraisal are by no means a homogeneous group; their influences, preoccupations and style vary wildly.” The Guardian profiles six women authors – Beryl Bainbridge, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, Jenny Diski, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and Molly Keane – whose posthumous legacies continue to grow. Alix Hawley wrote a fantastic tribute to Brookner here earlier this year, noting, “[n]obody does depression quite so elegantly.”
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My Dear Meat Paste
The Scottish poet Robert Burns’s “Address to a Haggis” might well be the most famous ode to a food product in the English canon. At The Paris Review Daily, Sadie Stein celebrates Burns’s birthday by reflecting on the poem, which starts off by describing haggis as the “chieftain of the pudding race.”
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My Neighbor, the Poet Laureate
Poets & Writers magazine has posted my interview with my Brooklyn neighbor and U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, along with a lovely recording of him reading his poem “The Mercy.” It’s worth a listen.