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
Curiosities
The Exile, home of the War Nerd, is back online at a new address after being forced to fold their print operation.Lots of folks were excited about Mark Twain being on the cover of Time. So was Season, until she opened the magazine.Will Leitch's story of meeting Hunter S. Thompson is brilliant, funny, and heartbreaking.The New Anonymous is a literary magazine with a clever concept. According to EarthGoat, "No name on your submission, the readers never see names, the editors are anonymous." Will anyone submit their work? Who is behind this mysterious mag?Summer book lists, compiled.Ever wonder where the word "ok" comes from? "The abbreviation fad began in Boston in the summer of 1838 ... OFM, 'our first men,' and used expressions like NG, 'no go,' GT, 'gone to Texas,' and SP, 'small potatoes.' Many of the abbreviated expressions were exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One predecessor of OK was OW, 'oll wright,' and there was also KY, 'know yuse,' KG, 'know go,' and NS, 'nuff said.' The general fad may have existed in spoken or informal written American English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. OK's original presentation as 'all correct' was later varied with spellings such as 'Oll Korrect' or even 'Ole Kurreck'. Deliberate word play was associated with the acronym fad and was a yet broader contemporary American fad."
The Prince of Horror
"Hill had maintained a daily writing routine since age 13, completing four or five books as a teen and four more as an adult, and was now, at the cusp of 35, finally putting out a novel—a ghost story." GQ profiles Joe Hill about his writing, being the son of Stephen King, and finding success in his own right. From our archives: our own editor Lydia Kiesling's essay on King, nostalgia, and America.
“Fruit flies or not, I do have a heart,”
It's come to this. Since it first emerged, the @horse_ebooks Twitter feed has been alternately obsessed over and totally ignored for its ersatz Dadaism. Now a group of intrepid fans have begun writing fan fiction dedicated to its enigmatic writing prompts.
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An Irish Books Mule
Anne Enright remarks on Irish censorship, and she recalls the time her own mother was used “as a books mule.”
Launching Soon
There’ll soon be a new literary website (and publisher!) in town. C0-created by the founders of Electric Literature and Black Balloon Publishing, and featuring Butter writer Mensah Demary as Associate Web Editor, Catapult will publish ebooks and print books, in addition to offering writing classes and publishing shorter pieces on its site. Get your stories and essays ready -- they’re now accepting submissions.
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Reading Through Trauma
“My whole life, I had used stories, both my own and other people’s, to check out of grocery store lines and long bus trips, stints in doctors’ waiting rooms, heartache, my own depression, and finally of the tedious exhaustion of new motherhood. Now, here I was in this 15-by-20 room, where monitors and alarms were constantly beeping, and there was no way out, except the unimaginable.” Alyson Foster, author of Heart Attack Watch, writes about her son’s illness and her love of reading.
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Nothing if Not Consistent
Fans of Moby-Dick should read Nathaniel Philbrick's outstanding historical account In the Heart of the Sea. The book, which tracks the fate of The Essex, a New England whaling vessel sunk by a humongous sperm whale in the South Pacific, is vivid and harrowing. It's also, as it turns out, only one of the naval catastrophes to befall George Pollard, Jr., The Essex's captain: a second wreck of his was recently located off the coast of Hawaii.
The Bard 2.0
To celebrate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death in 2016, he's getting a makeover. Jeanette Winterson is writing a cover of The Winter's Tale, and Anne Tyler will be revamping The Taming of the Shrew for a 21st century audience. While you wait, watch Joss Whedon's update of Much Ado About Nothing.
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