Folks who’ve read Mark O’Connell’s Epic Fail (excerpt) may have a perverse curiosity concerning Amanda McKittrick Ros. Widely considered to be one of the worst authors ever to write, McKittrick Ros’s infamous 1887 novel Iddesleigh is available for free download.
She Tried. That’s What Matters, Right?
A Mummy Love Story
The great singer-songwriter Josh Ritter is on tour with Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit. In honor of that, here's puppet master Liam Hurley's video for Josh Ritter's beautiful ballad "The Curse," a song about a mummy falling in love with the archeologist who discovers him.
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Blake Butler on Submitting Writing
HTMLGiant's editor Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year, has compiled a list of things he's learned from submitting his writing.
Old Hand
Edith Pearlman has been writing stories for a long time, but it’s only recently that she’s received widespread attention for them, as evidenced by this New Yorker piece on the author by James Wood. In it, Wood writes about the ways in which Pearlman is “a fabulist in realist’s clothing,” among other things. Pair with: Josh Cook on Pearlman’s book Honeydew.
Catlin Seaview Survey
One of my favorite Google Easter Eggs was the (now removed) instruction to "swim across the Atlantic Ocean" in order to get from New York to London. Today, however, that joke seems prophetic. Google, in conjunction with The University of Queensland and the Catlin Group, has created the Catlin Seaview Survey or, in other words, "an underwater variant of the Google Street View service."
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David Foster Wallace’s Last Interview
Coming soon from Melville House's "The Last Interview" series: the last interviews with David Foster Wallace and Jorge Luis Borges.
Marlon James’s Minnesota
"In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them. By now, the person I created in New York was the only one I wanted to be. ...Eight years after reaching the end of myself, I was on borrowed time. Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica." Marlon James, author of The Book of Night Women, which once gave me so much trouble, and whose novel A Brief History of Seven Killings the Book Report covered here, writes for the New York Times Magazine about leaving Jamaica to find himself in Minnesota.
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A Chinese Finnegan
"May God give me the courage to finish it:" The London Review of Books profiles one woman's attempt to translate Finnegans Wake into Mandarin Chinese.
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