Yesterday, our own Elizabeth Minkel pondered if Twitter fiction could be real art. She cited Teju Cole, a literary Twitter master, but what does he have to say about how Twitter affects his writing? “My memory is worse than it was a few years ago, but I hope that my ability to write a good sentence has improved,” he told The New York Times.
Teju’s Twitter
Dzanc and Melville Houses’s Independence Sales
Not to be outdone by Graywolf, Dzanc Books is also offering an Independence Sale of its own. You have until July 7th to buy one, get one free over at their website. Likewise for Melville House, which is offering a 40% discount on everything it’s got.
Writing through Dementia
Recommended Reading: Gerda Saunders’s essay “My Dementia: Telling who I am before I forget” on being a writer with dementia. “Looking back at the chapters I’ve completed, I ask myself, ‘How come I can still write? Could I be faking dementia?'”
Levin and Vronsky Are Dead
November 16th marks the release of the new film version of Anna Karenina (written by Tom Stoppard), which you can watch the trailer for here. It might also be a good time to brush up on the novel itself.
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Area Woman Makes the Best of It
What do you do when McSweeney’s rejects your humor piece? You could, like most people, slink off and write something new, perhaps after a quick look at the site to get a better sense of what they’re looking for, or you could write a new humor piece about getting rejected by McSweeney’s. At The Nervous Breakdown, Rachel Pollan takes the latter route (with a cameo by the movie Swingers).
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“Jawline of an aircraft carrier”
“It’s like a crackpot combination of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute and Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Does this crazy idea work? Maybe 70 percent of the time, but when it does it’s both daring and brilliant.” At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir is surprised by Anna Karenina.
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Pythonated
We’ve published a fair number of pieces about the import of book covers. You may have read one of our US-UK book cover battles. Over at The Awl, Amanda Pickering takes a look at one of the stranger aspects of book design: the animals that appear on the covers of programming books.
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