Got a crush on Draco Malfoy? J.K. Rowling is concerned. In a piece on her website, she writes: “I have often had cause to remark on how unnerved I have been by the number of girls who fell for this particular fictional character.” Pair with: our own Elizabeth Minkel on Rowling and other authors with second thoughts.
Bad Boys
Quote for the Ages
While doing some work for his publisher, Jesse Browner discovered something odd about a book he published twelve years ago. One sentence — one he thought of at the time as mostly unremarkable — went viral after the book came out, eventually reaching over two thousand hits on Google. What was it like to find this out? At The Paris Review Daily, he writes about the experience. You could also read our interview with our own Mark O’Connell on viral celebrity and his e-book Epic Fail.
Readers and Returns
“I would argue that decent books coverage in a daily newspaper — especially when it’s presented in such a way that readers are likely to stumble over it and discover titles they might not otherwise have heard of — is more supportive of writers in the long run than a scholarship program.” At Salon, Laura Miller explores literary culture and the downsides of the MFA, which include teaching high school.
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Poetry in a Box
Recommended Reading: On poetry about poem-making and the poetics of assemblage.
Scrubbing Facebook
Adrian Chen spoke with a former Facebook employee, and learned “how Facebook censors the dark content it doesn’t want you to see, and the people whose job it is to make sure you don’t.” In short: exploitation of “human content monitors” in the third world.
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#LitBeat: NYC <3’s The Rumpus back!
Last night Colson Whitehead, Sam Lipsyte, Amber Tamblyn, and Andrew McCarthy read to some New Yorkers at Public Assembly, simply because practically everyone likes The Rumpus. Here’s Specter Magazine’s editor, Mensah Demary, with the latest installment of #LitBeat.
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Twitter Fiction Festival
On Friday Twitter announced their new Twitter Fiction Festival, a “virtual storytelling celebration.” The festival will feature “creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world,” and you can submit story proposals over here.
‘Mockingbird’ Removed from Reading List
A Mississippi school district has decided to pull Harper Lee‘s To Kill a Mockingbird from its junior-high reading list because it “makes people uncomfortable.” The novel, which frequently tops the American Library Association’s “Frequently Challenged Book” list, tackles racism. See also: an essay on the symbolism of mockingbirds.