Two decades after the release of the first Goosebumps book, Jen Doll checks in with R. L. Stine.
Goosebumps Turns Twenty
Pale King Pre-Orders
David Foster Wallace’s final novel, The Pale King, is now available for pre-order. 432 pages. (via)
●
●
Honor My Profession
For Your Viewing Pleasure: an animated lecture by Kurt Vonnegut in which he talks about man-eating lampreys and warheads filled with sperm. It is a lot like what it sounds like.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Zambra; Close; Hatton; Rathbone
Out this week: Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; The Hopefuls by Jennifer Close; Monterey Bay by Lindsay Hatton; and Losing It by Emma Rathbone. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
●
●
First Sentence
“I cannot help feeling, on being invited to contextualize my own fiction, that the least qualified person possible has been asked. It is more still: hesitance, dread, that as a blind man in a failing aircraft I have been offered the yoke. I imagine it is the same for other writers, for the very fact that you write a story, and not a critical essay, suggests that near everything you hope to say lies outside the bounds of explicit statement.” Despite all that, here’s an essay by Greg Jackson at Granta in which he attempts to contextualize his own fiction.
The Writer’s Mimicry
“When is it plagiarism, when is it homage? Especially in creative writing, I get tripped up on this distinction. A trick for writer’s block: write an imitation, steal moves, learn by mimicry. For my own poem-writing, I turn to other texts all the time. I pull language, take a word I like, sometimes fragments of phrases and twist them. I get inspired, I want to model after poems I fell madly for.” On discovering another writer’s plagiarism.
●
●
A Master’s In Self-Publishing?
Because its administrators believe “self-publishing is now a highly successful and respected business model for both new and established authors,” The University of Central Lancashire has created a Self-Publishing Masters program. (Clearly they didn’t read Edan Lepucki’s Millions article from 2011.) According to the program’s official website, “this dynamic course … reveals how to make self-publishing work for you.”