The folks at Write By Night are embarking on a quest to organize State Writing Resources (“from conferences to local critique groups to literary magazines”) for all fifty states in our nation. The first two destinations on the docket? Alabama and Alaska, respectively.
Write Across America
n+1: The Singles
Millions fave n+1 has begun putting out a series of mini-ebooks via Kindle Singles. Three are available thus far: “Octomom and the Politics of Babies” by Mark Grief, “Gatsby in New Delhi” by Siddhartha Deb, and “Argentinidad” by Benjamin Kunkel.
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“He’s like a Shakespeare.”
How do you “challenge Muslim stereotypes” in film? Add more white actors. The director of a biopic about 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi hopes to have Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. star in the film.
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Out West
“At the outset, Nair is in Sierra Leone to keep tabs on his old friend and uses the occasion to practice a little freelance extortion, stealing unspecified multinational secrets on a flash drive and sending them back to his girlfriend in Amsterdam. The first 50 pages are like a Johnsonian take on Graham Greene’s humid morality-play potboilers. Nair keeps meeting shifty European acquaintances and distrusting everything they say.” John Lingan reviews Denis Johnson’s new novel.
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Beer is a beer is a beer is a beer
“There is no use no use at all in smell, in flavor, in taste, in anything, there is no use at all and the lack of respect is mutual. More, that is more, yes. But what I want is less.” Gertrude Stein reviews Bud Light Lime and other beers at The Rumpus’ Funny Women Column.
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Tastemakers
Despite his popularity in Europe, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig never hit it big in America. At Flavorwire, Jason Diamond argues that this may be about to change, thanks to an unlikely culprit: the latest Wes Anderson film.
The Count
“And who could disagree? Joyce Carol Oates expressed her view on Twitter: ‘Wikipedia bias an accurate reflection of universal bias. All (male) writers are writers; a (woman) writer is a woman writer.'” Wikipedia has got a women writers problem.
Happy Ministries
Fans of Arundhati Roy are celebrating at the news that the author will publish a new novel, her first in 20 years, reports Electric Literature; The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness is scheduled for release in 2017. Our own Garth Risk Hallberg maaaaay have poked a bit of fun a few years back at the title of Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, but that was all in good fun.
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