Looking for someone to whip your writing into shape? Then tweet the new Gordon Lish bot, a Twitter account which offers unvarnished critiques of your tweets and fictional sentences. (Related: Frank Kovarik on the editor’s relationship with Raymond Carver.)
This Curiosity is Awful
A Toast to the Good Life
Listen to the latest episode of the 2 Dope Queens podcast, in which Year in Reading alum Roxane Gay drops knowledge about how to write a killer memoir.
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.
Not Just a Book Party
St. Mark’s Bookshop won their desired rent reduction, and is throwing a party to celebrate! (via.)
Computers Grading Papers?
The Hewlett Foundation is offering $100,000 to anyone who can create an “automated essay grader” (and in the process cost thousands of TAs their jobs).
A Lost Tale from Frances Hodgson Burnett
But I wanna have it both ways.
Alexander Nazaryan joins legions of hand wringers in this short rumination on children’s reading and e-reading. Me, I just want it both ways.