“Why on earth would you start a literary magazine?” In an essay for The New Yorker Stephen Burt offers a wide variety of answers, from promoting a new genre to promoting one’s friends. His article pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s lit mag question and answer: “What is the wider cultural influence of literary magazines? I am not sure there needs to be one.”
Why On Earth
Curious Case of the Missing Publishers
What’s going on in Hong Kong? Last week, a man by the name of Lee Bo became the fifth member of the Hong Kong-based publishing house Mighty Current, which specializes in provocative tomes about Beijing leaders, to vanish mysteriously. A few of those missing have been in sporadic communication with worried family members, letting them know in opaque terms that they are “helping with an investigation.”
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The Land of the Setting Sun
From the Ruins of Empire author Pankaj Mishra recently visited Japan and wrote about the experience for Caravan. In particular, he was struck by the ways “much of [the country] presents a spectacle of aged modernity,” and how “it is with some shock that you recall that Japan was where once the future lay, before its bubble burst in the early 1990s, and the country, pushed inward by adversity, became a strange absence in our lives.”
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“A Grand Experiment”
Year in Reading alum Daniel José Older responds to the writers speaking out against Trump.
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V. I. G.
A V.I.G. (very important garment) will be making its way to the U.S. this August. Pride and Prejudice fans can now see the shirt Colin Firth wore as Mr. Darcy in the exhibition “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity.” We rewrote the title of Pride and Prejudice and other books as clickbait. You should definitely read it.
Said the Gramophone
Over at Words Without Borders, Esther Allen considers how to translate a song. As she puts it, “A song that almost everyone in a given culture at a given moment knows is a unique cultural artifact, a crystallized collective experience, a profound trigger that sets off a complex string of shared emotions.” Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions essay on songs as triggers.
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Literally the Most Interesting
"Interesting:" another word to add to the "overused" list?
Need Not Apply
"It may be vanity on my part ... but I have a fairly high opinion of the two pieces that I sent in." A 68-year-old aspiring writer has accused the Iowa Writers' Workshop of age discrimination, reports The Los Angeles Times. In his complaint, Dan Thomson cites "statistics from the program that reveal that, in the last five years, just over 100 would-be graduate students over the age of 50 applied to the program, but none made the cut." Doesn't he know you don't need an MFA, anyway?
Tomorrow!
This past week GOOD laid off most of their editorial staff, including former Executive Editor and creator of the #realtalk From Your Editor tumblog Ann Friedman. Posting some extra #realtalk on her blog yesterday, Friedman announced that the band of former GOOD editors are looking for work and also launching their own magazine: Tomorrow.
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