The MFA rankings kerfuffle gets a contribution from Slate writer Scott Kenemore (which Roxane Gay promptly eviscerates), but this post appears to be the most level-headed assessment yet. (Last link via Hobart)
To MFA or Not to MFA
Literature With a Bang
What can you find at a gun show: firearms, NRA-lovers, and chapbooks? Patrick Wensink discovers the literary subculture of gun enthusiasts. Best chapbook titles: “Homebrew TNT,” “Beat the Box: The Insider’s Guide to Beating the Lie Detector” and “Emergency War Surgery.”
Serializing in the Digital Age II
City of Quartz author Mike Davis is writing a biography of the Los Angeles Times‘ bygone publisher Harrison Gray Otis. Appropriately, the installments will be serialized by the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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The Second Pass Interviewed
On the occasion of its first anniversary, The Second Pass founder John Williams gets interviewed by VQR. “I realize I’m not making a convincing case for the Luddite thing. You’ll just have to trust me.”
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“This is the biography of a book.”
NPR has an excerpt from The Most Dangerous Book, Kevin Birmingham’s look at “the battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses.”
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Literature Isn’t Publishing
“In re-organizing the priorities of book publishing—by inventing new models rather than trying to repeat past success, by valuing ingenuity over magnitude, by thinking of sales as a way to make great books possible rather than the point—indie presses aren’t just becoming the places where the best books are published; they’re already there.” Over at The Atlantic, Nathan Scott McNamara writes on why American publishing needs indie presses. For more of his writing, check out his essay on Denis Johnson for The Millions.
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Dispatches From ‘Nam
“In Saigon I always went to sleep stoned so I always lost my dreams, probably just as well, sock in deep and dim under that information and get whatever rest you could, wake up tapped of all images but the one remembered from the day before, with only the taste of a bad dream in your mouth like you’d been chewing on a roll of dirty old pennies in your sleep.” The 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time series over at The Guardian soldiers on with its ninth pick, Michael Herr’s Dispatches.
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Stellar Memoir
Maclean’s has an excerpt from Chris Hadfield’s forthcoming memoir, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth.
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