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.
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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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Not Just a Book Party
St. Mark’s Bookshop won their desired rent reduction, and is throwing a party to celebrate! (via.)
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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).
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A Lost Tale from Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frances Hodgson Burnett, best known for children's classics like The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy, shows her "weird" side in a new anthology.
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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.