Following up on a contest to redesign the cover of Lolita, Venus Febriculosa is at it again with a contest to redesign the cover of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. The prize this time is a whopping $1,000.
Covering Eco
Ruin-Reading
Junot Díaz is at home discussing his native Hispaniola as he muses on the function of apocalypse - New Orleans, Haiti, and Japan - in our global media landscape.
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That’s One Way to Get to Miami
Do you love the city of Miami Beach? Prove it with a poem. At stake is a two night stay at the Catalina Hotel and Beach Club, and the deadline for submissions is December 2nd.
The gun goes off in the end
"Maybe this is a writer thing, having pages and pages of stuff written that has not yet cohered into a completed arc, which, when you finish it, would be a laurel on which you could rest." A writer considers Chekhov's dictum.
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Like the Rugby Sestina
Villanelles and football predictions go together surprisingly well.
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Je Ne Sais Quoi
In her controversial book The Fall of Language in the Age of English, Minae Mizumura argues that English, thanks largely to its global predominance, threatens to lessen the diversity of expression in the world. At Bookslut, she tells interviewer Corinna Pichl about her book, her issues with lingua francas and things you can say in Japanese that you can't say in English.
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Monsters and Wild Things
At the Oxford University Press blog, Professor Stephen T. Asma considers the place of Where The Wild Things Are in our culture's larger obsession with monsters (zombies, wolfmen, vampires, etc.).
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There’s Even a Cash Prize
"Without your micro-fiction, we’re like a flightless bird, sauceless noodles, or decarbonated LaCroix. We loved the response to our last contest so much that, naturally, we’re having another one." Submit your 200-word stories of separation to Paper Darts for its second annual micro-fiction award, judged this time around by Lesley Nneka Arimah (whose What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky graced our most-anticipated list for the first half of this year).
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