song/book
Show Up, Don’t Show Up
“You’ll engage with your advisor in a free-form dialogue about essential skills such as plotting your next career, pacing your financial ruin, structuring TV binge-watching during optimal writing hours, and characterizing all of this as ‘learning how to fail.'” Hey, this new low-competency MFA from the fictitious Half Mast College sounds pretty great. Here’s our own Hannah Gersen on why she has foregone the MFA route entirely.
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Plotto
Who, or what, is Plotto? Find out about the art of mechanized storytelling, or what a cardboard robot has to do with melodrama and Law & Order.
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Late American Novel Fans
Word is there have been sightings of the book I co-edited The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books in the wild, though it’s officially due in March. You can keep up on all the news about the book, including events and links to excerpts on the book’s new Facebook page.
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Paralyzing Shame
Recommended Reading: Elissa Altman on writing and giving permission to succeed.
LGBTQ Characters Deserve Happiness Too
“So why should the stories about us always be about the bad stuff? We deserve the romantic comedy, the late night barfly scene, the silly, light-hearted stuff of life reflected back at us.” Camille Perri writes about the need for queer stories that are not rooted in sadness, trauma, or loss. Pair with: an essay on the commercial viability of LGTBQ literature.
First Steps
Can a book prepare you for motherhood? A reader asks this question in the Match Book column in the Times.
Dear Alice
Last week in the LRB, Christian Lorentzen used a review of Dear Life to slam the critical consensus surrounding Alice Munro. At Salon, Kyle Minor defends the author, who he thinks “demonstrates that the short story can operate out of a formal dexterity no less expansive in its possibility than the novel’s.”
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I stopped reading almost immediately after the line stating My Antonia is the most boring book assigned to high school English classes. It’s probably one of the ten best American novels ever written. I expect literary ignorance from the culture at large, but when people who supposedly care about books make comments like this it makes me sad.