As you might expect, the world of Game of Thrones fanfiction is complicated, pornographic and more than a little bit intimidating.
A Song of Spare Time
Chekhov, Journalist
Over at the New Yorker, Akhil Sharma argues that “Anton Chekhov’s “Sakhalin Island“, his long investigation of prison conditions in Siberia, is the best work of journalism written in the nineteenth century.” Pair Sharma’s argument, and admiration, with our own Sonya Chung‘s “I Heart Checkov” essay.
Tumblr Books: A Call for Submissions
Calling all Tumblr-ers! Chronicle Books, the company responsible for such web-to-paper successes as F*ck I’m In My Twenties! and Dads Are the Original Hipsters, is looking for “the next big humor book idea.” Details for submissions can be found on their introductory Tumblr post. The deadline is February 28th.
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Choking Hazard
Check out new fiction from You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine author Alexandra Kleeman.
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Anger is a Good Sauce
This article on M.F.K. Fisher, the godmother of American food writing, should be catnip for those of you who like reading about food almost as much as eating it. A onetime French expat, Fisher conducted “a one-woman revolution in the field of literary cookery,” most notably with her collection of essays The Gastronomical Me. (Back in 2010, Jessica Ferri wrote about Fisher for The Millions.)
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Miss Masterpiece
“The blackly comic energy of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—its caustic ebullience, the strange buoyancy of its suffering—is a remarkably American achievement, a kind of death-dance capered on the corpse of a vividly rendered early 1930s Manhattan.” On Miss Lonelyhearts, the darkest American masterpiece.
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Thou thing of no bowels thou!
Behold the Shakespearean insult generator, thou globe of sinful continents.
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Good Gugge-mugga!
Congratulations to the new group of Guggenheim Fellows in fiction and nonfiction, which, in addition to such luminaries as Kiran Desai and Colson Whitehead, includes past Millions contributors J.C. Hallman, Terese Svoboda, and Ben Marcus.
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Inside the Mind of a Book Critic
“A book critic working today must contend with a world in which more diverse voices are heard and the traditional gatekeepers have less power to enforce conformity.” LitHub interviewed Kate Tuttle, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, about literary criticism. Read our own Emily St. John Mandel on bad reviews.