Tumblr and the Believer are throwing a party at San Fransisco’s Make-Out Room! Sheila Heti will be there, and so will Issac Fitzgerald, and Melissa Graeber. If you’d like to cover this event for #LitBeat, well, just get in touch!
A TumBelivr event in San Fran!
Writing Indifferently
How was Charlotte Brontë at 8? According to her school reports, she “‘[wrote] indifferently’ and ‘[knew] nothing of grammar, geography, history, or accomplishments”. Of course, she went on to write Jane Eyre, and as The Guardian points out, many a famous writer received middling reports in school, so maybe there’s hope for other “indifferent’ writers.
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GQ Questions Lorin Stein
Among the breadcrumbs doled out in this GQ slideshow/interview with Paris Review editor Lorin Stein is this: John Jeremiah Sullivan helped him write his job application.
Glory Edim’s Empire of Knowledge
Well-Read Black Girl founder Glory Edim spoke to HuffPost's "We Built This" series on her passion for literacy and the urgency of protecting black women.
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First Novel Prize Longlist
The Center for Fiction has released the longlist for the First Novel Prize. The Girls by Emma Cline (see our review) and What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (see our review) are among the novels to make the cut.
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The Profane New Yorker
Earlier this week, The Awl diligently compiled the initial instances of various profanities in the New Yorker over the years. Now those meticulous folks at the New Yorker have offered up a number of corrections, including a visual first.
Get Shorty
Want your writing to have punch? Want your readers to believe you? “The five-word sentence as the gospel truth…Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence,” Roy Peter Clark writes in The New York Times. Sorry that every sentence in this post is more than five words.
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Least Favorite “Great Books”
Elif Batuman, Francine Prose, and Lorin Stein are among the critics, authors, and editors who reveal their least favorite “great books.”