“When someone asks me how I know someone and I say ‘the Internet,’ there is often a subtle pause, as if I had revealed we’d met through a benign but vaguely kinky hobby, like glassblowing class, maybe. The first generation of digital natives are coming of age, but two strangers meeting online is still suspicious…” Ah, the halcyon days of 2004 and internet anonymity.
Stranger Danger
VIDA Shall Be Pleased
By happy accident, the third issue of Brooklyn-based lit mag Armchair/Shotgun (which uses an anonymous submissions system) is composed entirely of female writers. Issues are available for online purchase. EDIT: Following our update, the publication put out a notice on how the “all-female-writers issue” issue came to be.
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The Art of Stealing
Richard Cohen writes about plagiarizing real people’s identities and the dirty side of writing. As Milan Kundera writes in The Art of the Novel, “The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel.”
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Letters to Roberto Bolaño
“The act of writing is a conscious act of humility”: Diego Trelles Paz recalls the advice on writing given to him by Roberto Bolaño during their brief correspondence, at n+1.
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The Old-New Journalism
“The repetitions, the ellipses, the onomatopoeia: All the markers of Wolfe’s stylistic DNA were adaptive mutations to a competitive climate, search-engine optimization for the typewriter age.” Here’s an interview with Tom Wolfe about his new novel, Back to Blood, which is receiving mixed reviews.
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