Lev Grossman offers some words of encouragement for aspiring writers: “because it turns out that talent, whatever that is, and that glowy aura, are only part of the picture.”
Lev Grossman on Aspiring Writers
Revisiting Olive with Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout discusses the surprising popularity of Olive Kitteridge, and why she revisited the character in her new book, Olive, Again.
●
●
●
Who Can You Trust Anymore?
A Russian publisher has stooped to a new low: it added “fake quotes from fake newspapers on the cover of a … novel released this summer.” That’s not all, either. Apparently the publishers are trying to bill the book as a “Swedish” crime novel even though it was actually written by a Russian under a pseudonym.
●
●
Chummers
I’ve written before about the First Sentence series at Granta. The magazine asks a prominent writer to explain how they came to write an opening line. Recently, they asked Bear Down, Bear North author Melinda Moustakis to talk about the beginning of her story “River So Close”: “She’s a good-for-nothing chummer.” You could also read Jonathan Russell Clark on the art of the opening sentence.
●
●
Duke to Publish Transgender Studies Journal
Duke University Press is set to begin publishing a transgender studies journal in 2014. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly will be “the first nonmedical journal dedicated to transgender studies.”
●
●
Awarding Ageism
“Make no mistake: if you run a prize, a “best of” list, a residency, with age guidelines you can’t fully justify then, however otherwise diverse your awardees, you and your organisation are consolidating racism, sexism, class and gender discrimination.” Joanna Walsh for The Guardian arguing that, by focusing on youth, literary awards and honors tend to reward “those most likely to have money, security, contacts, confidence.” See also our Post-40 Bloomers series, including interviews most recently with Lidia Yuknavitch and Cole Lavalais.
●
●
Lost and Unpublished T.S. Eliot Prose to be Collected and Published
Scholars estimate that since T.S. Eliot’s death in 1965, “roughly 90 percent of his prose has been out of print and unavailable to literary scholars.” That will change this year with the publication of the first volume in Ronald Schuchard’s eight-volume work, The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot.
●
●
The Scanner, Darkly
A used-book flipper, armed with a laser scanner and a PDA, delineates the unease he feels about the odd profession he has chosen.
●
●