Electric Literature just launched a new experiment with Israeli writer Alex Epstein. Epstein published his latest collection of “micro-fiction” for free on Facebook, and he wrote about the experiment on the Electric Literature blog. For the next week, Electric Literature will be publishing a sample of translations from his collection on their Facebook page.
Electric Literature’s Latest Project
Hot off the Motherboard: New Issues of OLM, N1BR
Along with the dreaded switch to Daylight Wastings Time, the first of the month brings new issues of Open Letters Monthly and N1BR. Between the two of them, you can find, among other things, reviews of Where the Wild Things Are, J.M. Coetzee‘s Age of Iron, Bob Seger, and the Complete Bloggings of Caleb Crain.
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I Tweet Therefore I am
Twitter lets writers think in public, and it’s changing the way we write, Thomas Beller argues in The New Yorker. “Does articulating a thought in public freeze it in place somehow, making it not part of a thought process but rather a tiny little finished sculpture? Is tweeting the same as publishing?”
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Franzen and Oprah: Together at Last?
If Moby Lives is right, the literary beef that erupted when Oprah selected Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for her book club and he rejected the (in his mind, dubious) honor is about to get a curious denouement. Speculation is that Freedom is poised to become another Oprah selection. And your author suspects that Franzen will be more welcoming this time around. (Oprah sticker haters should probably buy their copies of Freedom now, just to be safe.) Update: The AP confirms and so it begins again.
Oscar Wilde’s Love Letters Discovered
“No dress, just ourselves and a flask of Italian wine”; “Till Thursday night. This is all wrong, isn’t it.” A collection of love letters written by Oscar Wilde to a young male magazine editor have been discovered.
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A Not so Steamy First Time
Jesse Bering on his incredibly inelegant first time writing about sex. Cf. his most recent adventures of writing about sex, his new book Why is the Penis Shaped Like That?.
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Concealing Horrors
“According to David Means and his debut novel, Hystopia, [classic war novels] aren’t simply about confronting the horrors of war, but also about concealing them, hiding them under a layer of rationalizations and wishful thinking that often simplifies their lawless anarchy and finds sense, meaning and purpose where there’s little.” Over at Electric Lit, Simon Chandler reviews David Means’s Hystopia.
Encountering an Enfant Terrible
It’s 1957. You’re Truman Capote. Your editor at The New Yorker, inspired in part by an excellent sense of humor, has asked you to write about an upcoming film (based on a novel by James Michener) that stars none other than Marlon Brando. How do you handle it?
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