Morrisey, Lauren Groff, and Erica Jong are among the finalists for the 2015 Bad Sex in Fiction award. The award is presented annually by the British magazine Literary Review in an attempt to “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them.” Past winners include Norman Mailer and John Updike (the sole recipient of a prestigious lifetime achievement award).
Bulbous Salutation
Two Dollar Radio Gets Some Press
Over at Litreactor, Joshua Chaplinsky checks in with Two Dollar Radio, the publishing outfit responsible for Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, which was one of my Year In Reading selections last year.
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Saunders on Humor
"Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you’ve done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I’m always being edited by my inner nun." An interview with the inimitable George Saunders, author of Tenth of December, on his approach to humor. Pair with: our own reviews of his stories.
Who Pays Blogs
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Gone but Not Forgotten
"Their relative obscurity is what makes their fans so passionate — these are voices that never quite found the right audience when they were alive." Longreads has a reading list of forgotten women writers, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Anita Brookner, whom we profiled in our own pages last year.
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Poetry’s Lost Amateur Hour
Though no big name today, early 20th-century poet Florence Ripley Mastin published prolifically in her lifetime – a dozen times in Poetry, more than 90 in the New York Times. Poetry’s Ruth Graham argues that the successes of Mastin, an untrained amateur, say more about her times than her talent. These days, amateur poets today benefit from refrigerator poetry sets, numerous poetry apps and sites, and the infinite community of the internet, but the Times has long excised poetry from its pages. In the archives, Patrick Wensink meets and analyzes those who doggedly pursue poetry these faded days.
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The Prince of Horror
"Hill had maintained a daily writing routine since age 13, completing four or five books as a teen and four more as an adult, and was now, at the cusp of 35, finally putting out a novel—a ghost story." GQ profiles Joe Hill about his writing, being the son of Stephen King, and finding success in his own right. From our archives: our own editor Lydia Kiesling's essay on King, nostalgia, and America.