“One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, Midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience. The popular image of the copy editor is of someone who favors rigid consistency. I don’t usually think of myself that way. But, when pressed, I do find I have strong views about commas.” Mary Norris‘s “Confessions of a Comma Queen,” from the New Yorker.
Comma Confessional
Tatjana Soli on Paul Yoon
In The New York Times, Tatjana Soli gives high praise to Snow Hunters, the first novel by Once the Shore author and Best American Short Stories alumnus Paul Yoon. The novel, which tells the tale of a North Korean refugee named Yohan, proves that Yoon is “well-suited to the short form,” she writes. (Related: Soli has written for us.)
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BOMB’s Biennial Fiction Content
Have a short story manuscript and you’re not sure where to send it? BOMB Magazine‘s Biennial Fiction Contest, judged by Sheila Heti (who wrote How Should a Person Be? and was interviewed by The Millions here), is accepting submissions until the end of the month.
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Weird Science
“I do remember thinking ‘You can’t get involved in the particle physics of fantasy.’ You can take it down to a certain level but if you get too involved in the particle physics then it’s not [useful] to continue. So I guess we have a branch of science that even its practitioners do not understand, that they may as well call magic.” Talking with David Mitchell.
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The Great Terry Castle
“Much of what passes for advanced literary scholarship these days is dreadful twaddle — incoherent, emotionally empty, deeply illiterate,” says Terry Castle in a recent interview with Salon about her new book of essays, The Professor. You can also catch Castle in the most recent issue of The New York Times Magazine.
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RIP MCA
Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch AKA MCA has died at 47, due to cancer. Pitchfork has more.
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Gwendolyn Brooks’s Archives Headed to Urbana-Champaign
The literary archives of Gwendolyn Brooks – the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize – are headed to the University of Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The haul amounts to more than “150 boxes stuffed with manuscripts, drafts, revisions, correspondence, scrapbooks, clippings, homemade chapbooks in which Brooks neatly handwrote her earliest (unpublished) poems, and heavy bronze awards ensconced in velvet-lined boxes collected later in her career.”