Pulitzer winner Tony Horwitz describes – in incredibly depressing fashion – his experience publishing Boom, a digital short representing his first foray into “the brave new world” of digital publishing. Two takeaways for aspiring writers that are not explicitly mentioned, however: don’t write without a contract, and be sure to use an agent from the get-go.
“I’ve escorted two e-partners to the edge of the grave”
Not Evil
Recommended reading: Sara Polsky writes for the New Yorker about “The Detective Novel That Convinced a Generation Richard III Wasn’t Evil.”
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What Knoll Knows
Jessica Knoll shares the survival story that informed her novel, Luckiest Girl Alive.
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The Road Trip Novel in the Modern Age
History professor Allen Pietrobon discusses the need to update the canon of road-trip fiction to include women and people of color.
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Slave Driver
Recommended Reading: Katherine Sunderland on Michael Bundock’s The Fortunes of Francis Barber.
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There’s A New Oz in Town
The new Wizard of Oz prequel, Oz: The Great and Powerful, which stars Mila Kunis and James Franco among others, has its first official trailer. The film will release in 2013.
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River Phoenix’s Final Film
In 1993, River Phoenix was working on Dark Blood, an independent film that was supposed to be the underdog surprise of the year. But when Phoenix died three weeks before shooting was supposed to wrap, the project stopped in its tracks. Now, almost 20 years later, the original director and editor are piecing the bits together, and they plan on screening it at the Netherlands Film Festival in September.
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Careless Cervantes
Ilan Stavans’s introduction to the quadricentennial edition of Don Quixote is available on the Literary Hub website. As he explains it, the narrative is both baffling and perfect: “What I like most about Don Quixote is its imperfection. I wasn’t wrong in my teens about the sloppiness of the writing; it is just that my attitude was too pedantic. It is, unquestionably, a defective narrative. Cervantes is often criticized as a numb and careless stylist.”
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Ada Limón on Reading Ray Bradbury in High School
"I had never read stories like this." Ada Limón on being given Ray Bradbury's The October Country by her high school English teacher.
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