Recommended Reading: “A Sailor” by Randa Jarrar.
A Turkish Sailor
newspeak is actualy newtxt
John McWhorter, linguist and author of What Language is (And What it Isn’t and What it Could Be), takes a look at the history of spoken and written language in an effort to understand how text messaging, IMs, and other informal forms of written language impact literacy.
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So, You Want to Submit to a Literary Magazine
Over at The Review Review, Chuck Augello provides a useful guide for writers trying to determine where they should submit their work. He covers several aspects of the process: Identifying Potential Markets, Circulation, Evaluating the Journal, Evaluation Criteria, and Simultaneous Submissions. None are more important than the last, though: Do the Work.
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Picador’s Tumblr Makes Up For Lost Time
The Picador folks joined Tumblr recently (like we asked) and they’re making up for lost time already. They’ve already instituted something called “Sunday Sontag,” and they’ve posted a Spotify playlist comprised of 140 “contextually literary” tracks.
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How to read the New Yorker this summer
Starting today and lasting until the end of the summer, The New Yorker is completely free online, including archives back to 2007. What to read? To start off, try searching the fiction page for, say, George Saunders. There’s that famous Lawrence Wright piece on Scientology. Or feel free to consult the magazine’s own roundup. But I happen to be most impressed by this grandaddy of all longform articles on six survivors of Hiroshima (subscription required).
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Dead Air
Máirtín Ó Cadhain is probably the most famous Irish writer you haven’t heard of, if only because he wrote all his masterworks in Irish rather than English. His best novel, Cre na Cille, has a simple and arresting premise: a town in Connemara has a graveyard in which the dead can speak. In The Guardian, Kevin Barry (who we interviewed) reads the novel for the first time.
Eating with Proust
“In fact, the lack of action in the food memoir can be compensated with narrative and theme.” Angshuman Das writes on the food memoir at Ploughshares. Pair with a piece from our own Hannah Gersen on Proust’s Habit and the gluten-free diet.
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Against Capital Punishment
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Traveling with Orhan Pamuk
Want to see the real Istanbul? Take a tour with the ultimate guide, Orhan Pamuk. The author showed The New York Times’s Joshua Hammer around the city. Pair with: Our review of The Museum of Innocence and our essay on his politics.