Did you dig “After Ellen,” Justin Taylor’s short story in The New Yorker? How about his interview for the Page-Turner blog? Yea? Well here’s even more: Joshua Cohen talks with The Gospel of Anarchy author for Jewish Book Council.
Justin Taylor Threepeat
You/Are Entering
Apparently the confessional poets hated being known as confessional poets. Writers like John Berryman and W.D. Snodgrass responded badly when given the label. How do we understand their shared revulsion to the term? At The Paris Review Daily, an argument that we can find the answer in an unlikely place: The Twilight Zone.
“All dialogue? Really?”
Seeing as the latest Dave Eggers book consists of all dialogue, it’s a good time to look back on the history of all-dialogue novels. Alexander Kalamaroff, writing for The Rumpus, identifies a few examples, among them The Waves by Virginia Woolf and numerous works in Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme.
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The Alfar
If you run into trouble in Iceland, blame the elves. 54.4 percent of Icelanders believe in the invisible creatures, and elves cause environmental protest today. "Beliefs in misfortune befalling those who dare to build in elf territory is so widespread and frequent that the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration has created a five-page 'standard reply' for press inquiries about elves," Ryan Jacobs writes for The Atlantic. Pair with: our essay on Icelandic writer Sjón.
Let’s Relive the Election Through Books
The 2016 election will never truly end, at least not in the literary world. Buzzfeed noted that "a series of recent campaign books have enjoyed monster debuts, demonstrating a voracious reader appetite for behind-the-scenes looks at one of the most surprising elections in history". And before you think this trend will end any time soon, Buzzfeed lists some up and coming titles that will be published later this year or sometime next year. "The success of campaign books come during a tough period for the publishing world, where industry sources have described the difficulty of getting authors on television or attracting media attention in a frenzied environment focused on Trump." We're all about the publishing industry doing well but this seems like a slightly unhealthy obsession for both readers and publishers.
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Words came in, marked for death.
The New Yorker has been hosting a Twitter game show, and this time around the contestants were words and in a macabre turn each word was berated by the audience, the people calling out for the death of that contestant. One word was forced to ultimately bite the bullet and will no longer be welcome in the magazine's next issue. Tragic.
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Appropriate Today More Than Ever
For the tenth anniversary of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich has penned a new foreword and introduction which you can read here.
The Master
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