It’s hard to write when the internet beckons. So has said Dani Shapiro and our own Emily St. John Mandel. Colson Whitehead doesn’t necessarily agree, however. Ditto for our own Kevin Hartnett. Now the folks at Electric Literature have thrown in their two cents.
The Internet v. Writing
Emo Allan Poe
Quoth Edgar Allan Poe or an emo band? Take this trickier-than-it-looks quiz, and decide for yourself.
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Funny Ways of Showing It
It’s not a commonly held opinion, but Hilary Mantel thinks Henry VIII was a romantic. In a brief interview with Jamie Sharpe, the Wolf Hall author dispels the common view of the oft-married king as a philanderer. “He thought that he had to shape his life and shape his kingdom for each woman,” she says. “Men didn’t think that way in those days.” You could also read Damian Barr’s interview with her at The Millions.
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Big Sky
I’ve written before about Literary Enemies, a series at the Ploughshares blog in which two writers are shown to have opposing sensibilities. This week, Lily Meyer argues that Flannery O’Connor and Marilynne Robinson are a worthy addition to the series, as the former contracts narrative space and the latter expands it. Sample quote: “It seems to me that Marilynne Robinson’s project, in her books suffused with Protestant belief, has nothing to do with Jesus or with God.”
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New Norman Rush
New Yorker book critic James Wood dropped in on our “Best of the Millennium” piece on Norman Rush’s Mortals and offered this tidbit, “I think [Rush’s] next book — his first to be set in America — will be unlike anything he has written before.”
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Sex, Violence, & Satire Contest
Mixer publishing is running a “Sex, Violence, & Satire” contest with a $1,000 prize, and there’s still time to enter. So, if you’ve been chewing on the idea of writing a story containing “sex and satire,” “violence and satire,” or “sex, violence, and satire,” then consider this motivation to finish it up.