According to this week’s New York Magazine Approval Matrix, our own Kevin Hartnett’s article from two weeks ago is a highbrow yet despicable piece of writing. What makes it so despicable, you ask? Apparently they blame Professor Tom Ferraro’s adulatory passage on the The Godfather.
Despicable Us
Lish’s Legacy
Gordon Lish is famous for being Raymond Carver’s very involved editor, but his work has never been thoroughly considered before. David Winters, Greg Gerke, and Jason Lucarelli have set out to change that with a roundtable discussion of Lish’s legacy. “What can we learn from Lish? Well, we can take away a set of techniques, to be sure; ‘rules,’ if rules are useful to us. But we can also salvage something that looks almost lost in our time: a sense of the real, lived stakes of writing, its risks and its rewards.”
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The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance
(Reluctantly) Recommended Reading: On the surprising racism of children’s books.
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Chummers
I’ve written before about the First Sentence series at Granta. The magazine asks a prominent writer to explain how they came to write an opening line. Recently, they asked Bear Down, Bear North author Melinda Moustakis to talk about the beginning of her story “River So Close”: “She’s a good-for-nothing chummer.” You could also read Jonathan Russell Clark on the art of the opening sentence.
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Parting Is Blah Blah Blah
Say goodbye to Sadie Stein! Stein, who is moving on after two years as The Paris Review Daily’s correspondent, had this to say: “It is a strange thing to monetize your emotions. Anyone who writes or creates knows this. And the work one does on the Internet feels insubstantial, even by the flimsy standards of intellectual property. Any body of digital work is a funny mixture of ephemeral and immortal, and it’s hard to know how to feel about such an archive.”
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Launching Soon
There’ll soon be a new literary website (and publisher!) in town. C0-created by the founders of Electric Literature and Black Balloon Publishing, and featuring Butter writer Mensah Demary as Associate Web Editor, Catapult will publish ebooks and print books, in addition to offering writing classes and publishing shorter pieces on its site. Get your stories and essays ready — they’re now accepting submissions.
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Amazon’s Numbers Are In
The Digital Reader rounded up a list based on Amazon’s end of year book sales. Some interesting factoids: Dan Brown‘s Origin: A Novel was the most read and gifted book this holiday season, and Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale was the year’s most borrowed book from Prime Reading. Pair with: our cheat sheet for Kindle (and other e-reader) owners.
To read or NA to read
“You should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children,” Ruth Graham wrote in Slate last week, stirring the proverbial pot of new adult fans of Young Adult bestsellers like The Fault in Our Stars and Eleanor & Park. A host of YA-defenders rose up to shout her down. “You should never be embarrassed by any book you enjoy,” Hillary Kelly responds in The New Republic, unrealistically (we’re embarrassed by quite a lot). For the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg cites examples of worthwhile, complex YA fiction we can certainly support: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Pushcart War, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Westing Game.
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Early Dust Jackets!
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