Torpedo, the beautifully designed and illustrated Australian fiction quarterly that has featured Jim Shepard, Sheila Heti, Clancy Martin, and yours truly, now becomes the first of its kind to be fully Kindled. Copies are $2.99 here.
Short Stories for your Kindle
“describe this flight / and not add a last line.”
“All poems of public grief are private poems first,” writes Mark Doty in his evaluation of Wisława Szymborska’s poem, “Photograph from September 11th.” Indeed, what Doty learned “over the course of those dozen years, was that the words one hammers out in private, in order to attempt some kind of sense, may end up being used by people in ways you could have never anticipated.”
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Lateral Moves
What happens when a literary fiction writer tackles YA? If that writer is Sherman Alexie, he produces an award-winning book that rivals the quality of his books in other genres. At the Ploughshares blog, Annie Cardi writes about writers who’ve made this transition, including Alexie, Roddy Doyle and Louise Erdrich. You could also read our survey of high school students on the best YA books of 2013.
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Girl Prodigies
Millions contributor Michelle Dean wrote for The New Yorker‘s Page Turner about Opal Whiteley, whose childhood diary–written when she was six on scraps of paper–was published over 100 years ago to meet with acclaim, then controversy, and then obscurity. If girl prodigies interest you as much as they do me, you’ll also love this 2010 piece from Lapham’s Quarterly, on Barbara Newhall Follett.
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How Do You Raise a Bookworm?
Joe Pinkser takes a closer look at how a love of reading is fostered from a young age.
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Poems to Be Whispered
“Here’s / the deal: if you die / then I will be able to / drink again & no / one alive will even / blame me.” Year in Reading alumnus Nick Flynn has three new poems over at BuzzFeed READER. Pair with this Millions profile of Flynn.
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Writing Writing
When you want to distinguish fiction and poetry writing from academic work or journalism, you use a straightforward term: creative writing. But what if that term is not the one you should use? At Slate, an article on the subject by Cydney Alexis, originally published by Inside Higher Ed.
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