Passionate, intense, fearless … this essay on the history of book blurbs will have you positively clawing yourself with pleasure. We’ve blurbed about blurbs a couple of times here at The Millions.
Deft, Masterful
Hold On
Lindsay King-Miller — she of Ask A Queer Chick — pays tribute to an old friend who died before her twenty-sixth birthday.
Interview with Lisa See
Recommended listening: The Los Angeles Review of Books interviews author Lisa See.
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North Woods Winter Watercolor
Recommended Reading: Oliver Bendorf’s poetry comic “Experiment With Color in a North Woods Winter” at Hobart.
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Mind the Label
“By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best.” Suki Kim on writing a work of investigative journalism that was miscategorized as memoir. Pair with this Millions piece in defense of memoirs.
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Liminal Literature
Vol. 1 Brooklyn‘s Tobias Carroll presents a roundup of the best new literature blurring the lines between writing and the visual arts, including works that made cameos in Paul Auster‘s Leviathan and Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth. We reviewed the latter novel a year ago here.
Web 3.0: How Do We Pay for This?
The Present Group provides an interactive look at “how artists, cultural producers, and content providers have experimented with funding and support models during the Internet Age.” The scrolling timeline spans from 1998 through 2016, and it outlines the major innovations (and failures) as websites tried monetizing.