Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
Listen Up!
Cultural Moments
“It took me ten years (four of writing, six of rewriting) to complete The Listener. Now ‘trans is trending,’ and the book has been published into this particular cultural moment, one I could never have envisioned twelve years ago.” Rachel Basch discusses writing in the context of social change at Lit Hub. Pair with our own Sonya Chung’s piece on literary activism.
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Prize Stories
For Electric Literature, Kelly Luce shares what she noticed while reading short story submissions for the O. Henry Prize. Pair with Paul Vidich’s Millions piece about the future of the short story.
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Prufrock in Panels
Recommended Viewing: Julian Peters illustrated T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as a comic.
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“I was going to be an essayist, and it was going to be awesome.”
Nonfiction writing might work wonders for history books, but the heart of the genre is still the essay. In a piece for The Morning News Martin Connelly discusses his youthful resolution to be an essayist, which he quickly forgot and then gradually remembered. There are also ironic license plates, convicts and a baby, just to jazz everything up a little bit.
How to Pitch Your Addiction Memoir
A writer pitches an addiction, and a subsequent addiction memoir (working title: Running Up a Glass Hill on Roller Skates) to a publisher, at McSweeneys.
The Broken Novel
Literary fiction is falling apart, but it might be for the best, Ted Gioia writes. In his essay, he explores the history of the fragmented novel (or the polyphonic novel as we’ve written about before) from Winesburg, Ohio to A Visit From the Goon Squad and fittingly, he does it in fragments.
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