Coverage of The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (do you have your copy yet?) has been coming in at a steady clip: NYC publication CityArts takes a look; yours truly interviewed on The Marketplace of Ideas; Edward Champion offers a hasty response; the my co-editor sits down with his hometown paper.
Late American Novel Roundup
Amazon’s Programming
Look out, network television. Amazon’s hiring creative executives to shepherd “crowd-sourced scripts” through development.
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Nebulous Plotlines
You’ve probably heard it before: never end a story with the phrase “it was all a dream.” Unfortunately for the person who taught you this rule, many classic stories (including Anna Karenina) take place at least partially in dreams. In the NYRB, Francine Prose investigates the trope in fiction.
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Illness as Metaphor
Melissa Broder shares her thoughts on open marriage and illness in an excerpt from her So Sad Today. Pair with Gila Lyons’s Millions essay on writing through illness.
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#Beowulf
Medievalist Elaine Treharne teaches a course on Beowulf at Stanford, and one of her primary theoretical questions for her students is, “What is (the) Text? … What constitutes Beowulf?” So she got to thinking. She wondered what she and her students would do “with a social media version of the poem.” What ensued is a distillation of the great epic in 100 tweets, which you can read over here.