Recommended reading: Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams (which we covered here and here), writes again, this time about 52 Blue, “the loneliest whale in the world.” The full work is available at Atavist for $3.99, but an excerpt is available at Slate.
52 Blue
Fork It Over
It has become increasingly common for publications to charge a fee upon submitting work. According to The Atlantic, this practice spells disaster for the writing community at every level. Quit paying out to big journals and just charge yourself the fee instead–here’s a piece on the efficacy of self-publishing.
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Brillante
Is Alejandro Zambra the new great Latin American writer? James Wood thinks he is. In the latest New Yorker, he describes how Zambra’s new story collection alerted him to the writer’s oeuvre, going on to analyze all three of the writer’s novels in English. You could also read our 2011 interview with Zambra.
Art of Seduction
Last week, Erin Fortenberry reviewed Walter Kirn’s Blood Will Out for The Millions, writing that the events in the book were partly centered on Kirn himself. Now, in the Times, Janet Maslin reads the book, which struck her as “primarily a tale of seduction.”
A Brief History of Gay Liberation
“If the taglines used to market lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans to the country’s mainstream—‘Love Wins,’ ‘It Gets Better,’ and ‘You Can Play’—have led to unprecedented levels of inclusion and visibility, it is precisely by shoving sex aside and presenting gay people and straight people as essentially the same at heart. In the process, as the outsider status attached to being gay disappears in more and more contexts, some of gay culture’s radical roots risk being expunged from memory.” On Jim Downs’s Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation.