“Imaginary Oklahoma” is an ongoing platform at This Land Press in which “some of today’s most important and influential writers combine with artists from outside the state [of Oklahoma] to provide a fictional take on this place we call home.” New Yorker editor, author of Celebrity Chekhov, and chart enthusiast Ben Greenman has written a piece entitled “Always and Forever.”
Imaginary Oklahoma
Pun titles for the win
In which Jami Attenberg (whose forthcoming The Middlesteins made it to our big 2012 second half books preview) discusses the outright mockery of Jeffrey Eugenides’s pseudo-famous vest in the web advertising campaign (which–full disclosure–also ran on The Millions) for Jennifer Weiner’s The Next Best Thing: “Hit Me with Your Vest Shot.”
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Buying The Believer
The Believer was acquired by the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The magazine will continue to publish bi-monthly, with the first edition under new leadership dropping on August 1st. They’re also hiring a managing editor.
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On Ebooks on the Cheap
Chad Post of Open Letter Books writes a compelling piece on the devaluing impact of ebook pricing, and why, despite that, Open Letter not only now offers ebooks, it put them all on sale for $4.99 for the month of June.
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Introducing The Offing
Trend alert: there’s been a surprising proliferation of literary site spinoffs lately. First The Toast began The Butter, and then Electric Literature started Okey-Panky. Now the Los Angeles Review of Books joins the movement with The Offing, an online lit mag launching later this month.
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“Let me eat it all and let me eat it now!”
“McDonald’s, I am here and I am hungry, feed me, let me eat it all and let me eat it now! Oh, what a hymn, what a hallelujah you sing to me, two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun.” Michael Murray imagines “Jack Kerouac‘s Lost Restaurant Reviews” for Hazlitt and they are absolute joys.
Antebellum YA
Move over Bella and Edward; Scarlett and Rhett were the original young adult power couple. At The New York Times, Claire Needell argues that Gone with the Wind is the epitome of the young adult novel. “The choice between two starkly different lovers (one gentlemanly, one roguish) appears, for the very young, to be a choice between two utterly distinct potential identities, two possible roads through life.”
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Eating And/Or Reading
“The joy of reading about the meals of others shows that, in many ways, we are simple creatures: by merely looking upon someone else eating we can feel better fed.” In the New Yorker, Bee Wilson considers the “Pleasures of the Literary Meal,” something Seth Sawyers wrote about for the Millions last year.