Mixer Publishing wants more of your sex, violence, and satire. They’ve just extended their contest deadline–for fiction, poetry, and graphic stories–to the end of the month, which gives you a few more weeks to conjure and submit satirical lust and gore for a chance to win their $1,000 prize.
Mixer’s Sex, Violence, & Satire Contest Extended
Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100
Knopf publicity bigwig Paul Bogaards kindly plunked us onto his Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100. We’d note that we’re run out of basements throughout the NY-metro area (and not just NJ), but we’re too busy telling the Stieg Larsson estate to eat our dust.
The Feel of Municipal Politics
Recommended Reading: Parul Sehgal on Jonathan Franzen’s first novel. (You could also check out Eric Lundgren’s counterpoint.)
●
●
Like Moss
“Like moss, my family grew on a mountain. In the utmost northwest of Spain, they set down roots so thick that only despair could rip them out.” Lorena Piñeiro writes at Midnight Breakfast about her family and penance. Pair with a piece on the business of nonfiction.
●
●
Harvard and MIT Go MOOC
Harvard and MIT are partnering for an MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) known as edX. Currently, similar offerings are available from Stanford, Princeton, UPenn, and the University of Michigan. Unfortunately edX and others like it will grade student papers by utilizing “crowd-sourcing” and “natural-language software.” Oh, geeze. Not that again.
●
●
Girlhood
For The New York Times, Alexandra Alter writes about girls in titles lately—Emma Cline’s The Girls, Megan Miranda’s All the Missing Girls, and Amy Schumer’s The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, to name a few. Pair with Michael Bourne’s Millions review of The Girls.
The Story Button
There are a lot of writers who work in advertising, and it’s starting to have an impact. People are more likely to love brands if there is a story involved, according to a new study. “We’ve known for a long time there is no ‘buy’ button in the brain. But these results show there’s a ‘story’ button,” neuroscientist Paul Zak says. Pair with: Our essay on working at a creative agency after getting your MFA.