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?
High Praise for Rebecca Solnit
In a new issue of N1BR, Nikil Saval takes a look at Rebecca Solnit‘s latest, calling its predecessor River of Shadows “surely one of the best books of the past decade.”
Opiates
“The cause of death/was living/the immediate cause/of death was/living in Moscow.” At n +1’s website, Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich excerpt their translations of the Soviet poet Vsevolod Nekrasov.
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Early Days
The story of how a publishing house began is the definition of literary inside baseball, but this piece by Jonathan Galassi — in which the FSG president responds to an upcoming book on the heyday of his company — does a pretty nice job of spurring a general reader’s interest. Among other things, it reveals that First Wife Dorothea Straus once called the company’s office “a sexual sewer.”
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Backhanded
Writers have long been attracted to duels, if only because, for the most part, they offer an easy way to ramp up the conflict in a story. At Page-Turner, James Guida takes a look at their enduring relevance, with reference to the history of the duel in Europe. Pair with: our own Nick Moran on duels in Russian literature.
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