The shortlist for the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of 2010 has been announced. Among the hopefuls: Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way.
Titular Oddities
The Millions at the Critical Hit Awards
Hooray! Electric Literature has declared Jesse Jarnow’s Millions review of Fear of Music the winner in the category of Best Deconstruction for their occasional Critical Hit Awards.
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Hell on Mail
At HTMLGIANT, Roxane Gay gets down to the details of everything she’s learned about the challenges and pitfalls, much of it shipping-related, of running a micropress. Essential reading for those dreaming of starting a small press one day.
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Asian American Writers, Generation Next
The Guardian‘s Max Liu highlights several rising star Asian American authors, including Year in Reading 2017 participant Jenny Zhang. “After years on the peripheries of US fiction and poetry, Asian American authors have stepped into the spotlight during 2017. Books by writers of east and south-east Asian heritage are one of the hottest trends this year. […] Transcultural writers, born to immigrant parents in the US or immigrants themselves as children, they are channelling their experiences into writing that, with perfect historical timing, challenges readers to resist attacks on immigrants’ rights and to see refugees as individuals with unique stories.”
Return of the Literary Magazine
“If the novel is struggling in this new environment, what of literary magazines? Long extinct? The opposite: literary magazines are getting popular again.” Guardian documents the resurgence of the literary magazine, thanks to the internet.
Heathrow’s Second Writer in Residence
NME journalist and Man and Boy author Tony Parsons has been named London’s Heathrow Airport’s second writer in residence. He will use his weeklong stay to research for his new book Departures: Seven Stories from Heathrow. It will be released in October, and the BAA plans on distributing 5,000 copies to airport customers. In 2009, Alain de Botton served as the airport’s first writer in residence, and he used his stint to pen A Week at the Airport.
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Oratory Passion
The best Fourth of July speech? Frederick Douglass delivered it on July 5, 1852. Pair with a reading list for July.
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Say It Loud
At Longform, you can find a nifty old essay, originally published in 1990 in The Missouri Review, in which Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace pay a visit to a pioneering rap studio.
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Finnegans Draft
Ordinarily I would caution against reading a novel’s first draft, however in the case of Finnegans Wake, perhaps all rules should be tossed out the window. With this one, it seems as though any and all supplemental material might help unlock the finished product’s mysteries. Case in point: the entire first draft of Joyce’s most perplexing novel. (Of course, when all else fails, there’s always Michael Chabon to save the day.)