1963 Was a Nice Year for Criticism
Electric Literature v2.0
Electric Literature—first established as a cross-platform digital publisher, but best known for its popular “Recommended Reading” tumblog—has just relaunched itself as a literary advocate built around a strong website and social channels. C0-founder Andy Hunter tells the Washington Post, “Posting a cool photo on social media gets a much greater response than text alone, even in our audience of book lovers. While at first that might seem at odds with literary content, we’ve always felt that changes in the way we communicate create opportunities to reach more people.”
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New from Neil Gaiman
Exciting news, Neil Gaiman fans! The author will release The View from the Cheap Seats, a collection of his non-fiction work, this May. For more Gaiman, check out our own Tess Malone’s review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
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Sandman is Back
Neil Gaiman is famous for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the number one reason is Sandman, the graphic novel series that won the author nineteen Eisner and six Harvey awards. Now, twenty-five years after publishing the first issue, Gaiman has written a prequel, named Overture.
Shopping’s Scrivener
“I’m used to writing in very weird contexts.” Poet Brian Sonia-Wallace talks with Minnesota’s Star Tribune about his gig as the Mall of America’s first-ever writer in residence. Asked if he’ll go crazy during his several-day-long tenure, Sonia-Wallace answered “probably” (via Bookforum). Our own Marie Myung-Ok Lee had some opinions back when the residency was first announced.
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Recommended Reading from Roxane Gay
Book Riot has compiled a list of Roxane Gay’s recommended reads via Twitter. Some of her choices include Citizen by Claudia Rankine, God Help the Child by Toni Morrison, and City on Fire by our own Garth Risk Hallberg. See more books Gay recommends in our Year in Reading column.
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Excerpt from Good on Paper
Rachel Cantor’s pub day for Good on Paper (included in our first-half preview) was this Tuesday. Check out an excerpt from the novel at Lit Hub.
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Not To Be Confused With Sparkles
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the “Ted Wilson Reviews the World” series over at Electric Literature. This week, he takes on everyone’s (least?) favorite confection — sprinkles. Unsurprisingly, sprinkles score a bit higher than Anxiety did a couple weeks ago: “Sprinkles can take an ordinary cupcake and turn it into a cupcake that looks like a rainbow shattered and fell all over it, and then the leprechaun at the end of that rainbow hid inside the cupcake and the only way to get him is to eat it.”
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