Terrible sex writing spans the globe according to this year’s Bad Sex Award shortlist. It includes: My Education by Susan Choi, The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood, House of Earth by Woody Guthrie, Motherland by William Nicholson, The Victoria System by Eric Reinhardt, The World Was All Before Them by Matthew Reynolds, The City of Devi by Manil Suri, and Secrecy by Rupert Thomson. The winner will be announced on December 3.
Keep It in Your Pants and out of the Plot
Read what you want.
After last week's NYT "Room for Debate" feature, ostensibly in answer to the question of why so many adults read YA fiction, Roger Sutton at the Horn Book took umbrage at the panelists' only partial engagement with the question. In the end though, he makes his own position clear: "I don’t worry about adults reading YA novels. Read what you want."
Daily Dose of Fiction
101 Words has an ongoing flash fiction series, featuring the works of four writers every Sunday. This week’s edition includes a story by our own Michael Bourne, originally published in Tin House.
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Welcome to the Party, VQR!
Thanks to Jane Friedman, the Virginia Quarterly Review is really blossoming of late when it comes to social media and increased web presence. Case in point: these once-a-week poem posters on their Facebook page. Extra case in point: the sort-of-not-so-secret Tumblr they’re working on!
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To the Choir
It can be hard for critics to strike a balance between high theory and accessible prose. For James Wood, the key is to retain enough theoretical knowledge to come up with an insightful point, while still retaining the ability to write in a natural dialect. In The Guardian, he talks about his own relationship with books.
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Love in the Archives
“‘Are you wearing lipstick to the archive?’ my husband asked, peering over his coffee.
‘I always wear lipstick to the archive,’ I said.” On falling in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald in the archives.
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A Seminal Work
Over at The Literary Hub, real-life writer Anthony Marra has conducted a hilarious interview with Dana Schwartz, the creative mind behind everyone’s favorite–if uncomfortably familiar–Twitter account, @GuyInYourMFA. Here’s the New York Times review of Marra’s latest novel, The Tsar of Love and Techno.
Move Over, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
Frankly, it's just pretty hard to beat Raskolnikov's Inbox.
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