Michael Kimball wants to save you $50,000 dollars on an MFA – by sharing what’s he taught himself. Interested in reading more from someone without a traditional writing degree? Our own Hannah Gersen explains “The Value of Writing Programs: On Why I Don’t Have an MFA.”
$50,000 / Free
Orozco Takes the Saroyan Prize
Post-40 Bloomer Daniel Orozco won Stanford’s William Saroyan International Prize for Writing this week. His story collection, Orientation, beat out a murderer’s row of adversaries including Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West: A Country in Stories. Check out excerpts or stories from all three writers here, here, and here, respectively.
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Writerly Q & A
We’re pleased to announce a new feature here on The Millions, “Ask the Writing Teacher.” Our own Edan Lepucki will now be taking your questions about all things writing related, dialogue, plot, point of view, or other elements of writing that might be putting a pickle in your prose. Send your questions her way at askthewritingteacher[at]gmail[dot]com
Selfie Sadism
Did David Foster Wallace predict our anxiety over selfies? At The Wire, Danielle Wiener-Bronner argues that Wallace was prescient in Infinite Jest. Although videophony, his concept of video-chatting, isn’t the same thing as a selfie, the paranoia over looking good is strikingly current. “This sort of appearance check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen.”
“The meteor brought them into the mainstream”
If you’re like me, you thought three quick thoughts when you heard about the Chelyabinsk meteor: 1) I hope everybody is okay; 2) I hope The Possessed author Elif Batuman finds time to write about this; and 3) Thank goodness for Russian dashboard cameras.
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Fish N a Barrel
The Vault chooses the “20 Worst Hip-Hop Album Covers”. Sorry, South Coast Shorty.
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Up Next, Ice-Nine
Cat’s Cradle‘s Felix Hoenikker would be so proud: Stanford scientists have found a way to make a dense, extraterrestrial ice called Ice VII (via The Rumpus). See also: “2 B R 0 2 B”, a “lost” Vonnegut story that first appeared in the sci-fi journal Worlds of If in January 1962.
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