Book trailers are one thing, but what’s a literary short film? According to Red 14 founders Adam Cushman and Mike Sandow, “it’s not advertising a product; it gives a cinematic glimpse into the book, one which will ideally make the viewer interested in learning more about the author, the author’s current book, and the author’s past and future work.” Together, the pair has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund four such films about four worthy titles (Matt Bell’s awesome debut novel among them).
What’s a Literary Short Film?
A Journal for the People
Recommended Reading: Zinzi Clemmons, one of the founders of Apogee Journal, on the importance of editors of color and inclusive literary journals.
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“You should not have to care”
Recommended Reading: Jami Attenberg on lists and literary culture. (h/t Kyle Chayka)
Confessions of a Modern Opium Smoker
“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dickens wrote about opium smoking in their novels. But if you read the way they describe opium smoking, without a doubt these people never saw the real thing. It’s laughable…What we see in movies, even to this day, with the obligatory London opium-smoking scene is complete fiction.” Interview with a modern-day opium addict.
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State of Terror
Junot Diaz, whose novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, has been deemed “un-patriotic” and “anti-Dominican” by the Dominican Republic’s consul in New York City. Diaz had been working in Washington with Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat in the hopes of urging the U.S. government to take action against the abhorrent treatment of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic.
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To Essay
“For a while, shortly after I finished an undergraduate creative writing course, everything I wrote started with an observation or a realization…I was going to be an essayist, and it was going to be awesome.” At The Morning News, Martin Connelly writes about how he lost his drive to become an essayist and the surprising thing that makes him want to start again — his daughter. For more on the power of the essay, read our interview with Leslie Jamison.
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Appearing Elsewhere
My (very) short story “Pretzel Girl” is up at FiveChapters; it’s part of their second annual Infinite Chapters series, wherein a story is posted each day for a little over two weeks. So far, there are stories by Paul Yoon and Jami Attenberg, among others.
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