“Don’t discount the two greatest cures for [writer’s] Block: plagiarism and suicide.” Joshua Cohen dispenses some curious advice to writers at Ask the Paris Review.
A Cure for Writer’s Block
“Ultimately just plain nice”
Last week, I followed up the news that “because” may now be used as a preposition by noting that the American Dialect Society had named it their Word of the Year. Now, in The New Republic, John McWhorter argues that the new preposition is used to signal empathy and warmth. (Related: Fiona Maazel on the dangers of bad grammar.)
Weird: from wyrd
Odds Against Tomorrow author Nathaniel Rich has three words of advice for would-be writers, and he holds those words to be his personal mantra.
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Hop on the Raft
For the Poetry Foundation blog, David Winter interviews Night Sky With Exit Wounds author Ocean Vuong about poetry, how art is like public transportation, and turning your back on your own work. Pair with Andrew Kay’s Millions essay on the power of poetry.
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OWS and the Press
How do you spell t-r-a-c-t-i-o-n? Our recent stories about the spreading Occupy Wall Street protests seem to be part of a trend. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that the protests accounted for only 7% of coverage in all news media nationwide in the past week — but that’s a four-fold increase from the week before.
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Who Wrote What?
Do you want to work at The Strand in New York City? Think you have what it takes? Take this famous quiz and match each work with its author to see if you have the literary chops to pick up a paycheck from one of the United States’s most beloved bookstores.
A Forgotten Classic of the Harlem Renaissance
Almost 90 years after it was written, Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay is getting a chance to reach wider audiences thanks to Penguin Classics.
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