At The Daily Beast, Lizzie Skurnick writes about hip fatherhood, Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon.
Metoosexuals
Bad from Good
Sometimes good writers write very badly. As evidence, Literary Hub has collected samples of bad writing from the likes of Year in Reading alum Isaac Fitzgerald and Daniel Clowes, who we interviewed here.
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Greatly Exaggerated
Whatever your thoughts on Will Self’s claim that the novel as we know it is dead, it’s important to keep in mind, as Daniel D’Addario helpfully illustrates, that we’ve heard this claim before. At Salon, he goes all the way back to 1902 to trace the legacy of a long-held fear.
Mislabeled
Can writers transcend race? LaTanya McQueen argues that labeling fiction as minority gets in the way of the story at The Missouri Review blog. Also, see our essay on the racial and gender barriers in the publishing industry.
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Who She’s Writing For
Dispatch From the Future and The Fallback Plan author Leigh Stein explains that she is writing her forthcoming memoir, Land of Enchantment, for “everyone who’s been to more funerals than weddings, everyone who lurks on the Internet late at night looking at pictures of their lost loves, everyone who cries when a certain song comes on the radio because they think it must be a sign.”
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Book Scrapping
Not enough shelf space? Pay the people at 1DollarScan to scan and digitize your paper books into searchable PDF files for $1/100 pages.
Writing For Your Life
“I think essay and memoir hang together in a balance. There’s any number of ways to strike it, but from Montaigne on down that balance seems key to their design.” The Paris Review interviews the essayist Michelle Orange, author of the recent This Is Running For Your Life.
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In the Confessional
A harrowing interview with How to Sell author Clancy Martin is up at the Torpedo blog.