A Shakespearean consulted for Arthur Phillips‘ buzzed-about new novel, The Tragedy of Arthur, reviews…The Tragedy of Arthur. In which he appears. Alongside “Arthur Phillips.”
How Meta a Work is Man
The Island of Last Chances
Have you ever had a script rejected? Did you reassure yourself it had to do with just about anything other than the quality of your writing? Well now’s the chance to put your money where your mouth is – a new Hollywood startup called Adaptive Studios is “rummaging through the trash” and breathing new life into dead movie scripts.
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The Poor Mouth
You’ve likely heard that artists these days are in trouble. The probability that your average creative person will make a living from their art is getting smaller by the day. But amidst all this hand-wringing, we forget one simple fact — it’s always been getting worse, and there’s always been something killing culture. At Slate, Evan Kindley writes about Scott Timberg’s new book Culture Crash, asking whether the Internet is really the dread force it’s often made out to be.
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Writer: The Game
Trying to get some writing done? Procrastinate with a game about trying to get some writing done without procrastinating.
Making the Puzzle More Hip
Meet the 23-year-old who’s been tasked with “injecting some swag” into the “traditionally conservative New York Times [crossword] puzzle.”
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Valley of the Publishers
How exactly does a cult classic make the leap to critically-acclaimed bestseller? It isn’t easy. The Telegraph takes a look at the confusing, circuitous publishing history of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.
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The New VC
In Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, a series of short stories take the reader from the present day to 2025, exploring a near-future Vancouver in which things grow steadily more surreal. As Emily Oppenheimer writes, it’s clearly a work of speculative fiction, yet the setting resembles our own world in uncanny ways. Sample quote: “Compton achieves the more troubling, yet ultimately more satisfying, goal of portraying the fantastical as something that is very much rooted in what we think we already know about ourselves and our world.”
Beyond the Individual Self
Momina Mela writes on the gendered misconceptions about confessional poetry. As she puts it, “In comparison to female confessional poets, male confessional poetry has been regarded with less ridicule as accusations of being merely therapeutic. This is often due to the detachment which occurs with the adoption of personas, even though female poets such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and even Sharon Olds integrate the use of personas in their work as well.” Also check out this Millions essay on the poetry of mental unhealth.