On Online Publishing

Last week, to mark the release of The First Bad Man, we interviewed Miranda July here at The Millions. In Bookforum, you can read another interview with July, who talks about striving to mimic the feeling of “purposely unfinished work.”

Serious reading is harder than ever. With so many distractions around, it’s incredibly difficult for a novel to keep our attention. In The Nation, Joanna Scott makes a case that careful reading is in danger, and builds a case for preserving difficult fiction. You could also read our own Nick Ripatrazone on trying to teach Thomas Pynchon.

“What is the value of a book cover if fewer and fewer people shop at bookstores?” Nicholas Blechman wonders about the purpose of the book cover at The New York Times Book Review, but he also rounds up some of the best covers of 2014, including the design for Eimear McBride‘s A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing (Millions review here, McBride’s “Year in Reading” here).

Catapult.co, a new literary website and publisher from the founders of Electric Literature and Black Balloon Publishing, has debuted online this week. It features stories by Padgett Powell and Joy Williams, and a remarkable essay about living in New York by Alexander Chee.

“I realize that, like most fantasies, reality is likely to be more complicated. For starters, literary communities—like most communities—have echelons. They have cliques; they have ghettos. You are the wrong age, work in the wrong genre, don’t know the right people, don’t teach at the same program … Anyone who thinks this isn’t true is someone squarely at the center of his or her chosen circle.” On peripherality and the uncertain nature of literary community.