Despite recently winning the Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson writes a list of his favorite novels about failure for the WSJ: “This category is, of necessity, a crowded one. Novelists are drawn to failure. Those who prosper, or expect to prosper, in the world as it is have no need to re-imagine it.”
Fiction About Failure
#ThisIsWhere The Sun Bakes Our Chancletas
To kick off South Florida’s O, Miami poetry festival (which I’ve written about before), event organizers and WLRN staffers are asking local residents to snap photos of “a place in South Florida that means something to [them],” and “write a short poem about it including the phrase ‘this is where.’” Then, share the poems and photos on Twitter or Instagram for a chance to be featured throughout the month of April. Meanwhile, the New York Times is on it.
●
●
Books Nobody Reads
Maybe nobody read your first, or last, most recent or only book, but writer, take heart: nobody read the work of these 10 great authors either.
●
●
Music for Book Lovers
The publishers of the 33 1/3 series have made public the entire list of suggested albums submitted by their readers for the next book. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss your chance–the “Under-22” category is open through May of 2016. Pair it with our own Emily Colette Wilkinson’s hilarious musical soundtrack for her graduate school screenplay.
●
●
The Fallback Plan
Leigh Stein‘s writing has appeared in places such as DIAGRAM, H_NGM_N, and Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2010. She also has a weekly column for The Faster Times. Her debut novel, The Fallback Plan, will be released next January by Melville House. Publisher’s Weekly thinks pretty highly of it.
“There is No Truth”
Rule number one in journalism: Don’t call the person you are interviewing a fucking asshole. James Frey of A Millions Little Pieces discloses what he believes is the future of the written word. (via)
●
●
Canada, Don’t Take America’s Lead.
Millions staff writer Michael Bourne wrote a sobering piece for Canada’s Globe and Mail about the need for stricter gun control in the United States. “I can implore my new neighbours to maintain strict controls on guns,” he writes. “All our children’s lives depend upon it.”
●
●
A Listicle By Any Other Name
First our own Mark O’Connell pondered the relationship between listicles and our shrinking attention spans for The New Yorker, and now Arika Okrent suggests that a listicle is its own literary form – albeit a “gloriously unspecified” form, at that. Together, these pieces constitute 2 Meditations On Listicles That Will Totally Change Your Life.
●
●