In the latest installment of #LitBeat our intrepid reporter Tiffany Gibert finds herself celebrating The Common and transfixed by The Dog House Band.
#LitBeat: The Common Launch
Dear Sandy, Hello
A look at Ted Berrigan‘s letters to his institutionalized wife, collected in Dear Sandy, Hello, at The Poetry Foundation.
Shirley Jackson: Great American Novelist?
Laura Miller at Salon explains why she would choose the novels and stories of Shirley Jackson to be stuck with in an isolated cabin over those of Roth, Cheever or Carver.
“The Game” and Fan Fiction
Electric Literature has published a look at two new Sherlock Holmes fan fictions, “the game,” and various copyright complications, which just happens to dovetail with our own Elizabeth Minkel‘s Year in Reading account of admitting to loving Sherlock fan fic. In fact, loving the great detective has a lot to do with writing well: as Ryan Britt puts it, successful fan fiction authors “all love Holmes and his adventures way more than the man who created the great detective thought possible. Which, today, remains the biggest cultural mystery we’ll hopefully never get tired of investigating.”
Happy Baby Shower
The Rumpus’s Stephen Elliott is using Kickstarter to raise money for the film adaptation of his novel Happy Baby. However you could also fund the project in a more three dimensional plane by attending November 29th’s Fundraising Party (which we’re co-sponsoring!). The party will include comedy by Eugene Mirman and readings by Jami Attenberg and Rick Moody.
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What to Expect
Chief among your more anxiety-producing kinds of literature is the genre of books geared towards expectant mothers. Examples of the genre offer every bit of advice imaginable — much of it contradictory — and condemn a laundry list of relatively common behaviors. At Salon, our own Lydia Kiesling recounts her own dive into the pregnancy-lit waters. This might also be a good time to read fellow staff writer Edan Lepucki on the perils of reading while expecting.
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Stories Are Clumsy Beasts
Over at ZYZZYVA, Christian Kiefer talks to playwright Octavio Solis and novelist Scott Hutchins about the craft of writing and the difference between writing plays and writing novels. “It takes a huge amount of hard labor, man, to harness the forces that we are using to make our stories. They may emerge whole cloth out of our need to know how we operate as humans, but they’re often clumsy unfinished beasts.” Kiefer’s new novel, The Animals, is one of the most anticipated books of 2015.
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