“The gross-out factor of the last section stuck with me, but not in a way I enjoyed.” Writing workshop critiques as applied to your sex life.
Don’t Tell
The Literary Long Sentence
“In this age of 140-character Twitter posts — not to mention a persistent undercurrent of minimalism in our literature — there’s something profoundly rejuvenating about the very long sentence.” From Hrabal to Joyce to Hugo, Ed Park explores the history of the literary long sentence.
Listening for “Some Late-Summer Evening”
Recommended listening: The Southern Review has released a playlist perfect for summer listening, complete with five poems by Charles Simic.
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Exhausted by Celebrity
“Readers have grown tired of the slew of celebrity memoirs,” reports The Guardian. “About time,” we say.
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Lauren Groff and the Artist’s Response to Climate Change
To combat feelings of hopelessness, Lauren Groff partnered with Greenpeace on a new campaign to get artists to respond creatively to climate change.
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Body Works
Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel includes, among other discomfiting things, a series of fake advertisements for surreal women’s beauty products. The plot, which follows a proofreader named A, begins with the main character’s attempt to evade her roommate, and eventually brings A to join a “Church of Conjoined Eaters.” At Slate, Molly Fischer argues the book deftly captures our society’s weird treatment of femininity.
Geoff Dyer on Pagetti’s Syria
The devastating images of Syria shot by Franco Pagetti have been collected into a series entitled Veiled Aleppo. Over at The New Republic, Geoff Dyer writes about one of them. It’s an image, Dyer observes, that features “symbols … of the death throes not of a city but of film.”
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