Can confessional writing be literary? Kelly Sundberg writes, “When I sit down to write literary writing about my trauma, I am a writer first, and a trauma survivor second, but I am not ever not a trauma survivor, and as such, I am often interested in examining the roots and effects of my own trauma.”
Regarding the Pain of Others
Is Your Dog’s Smile Really a “Smile?”
Adorable pictures of baby hippos aside, it’s a common misconception that animals are “smiling” at you out of sincere happiness. Probably you’re projecting that onto them, writes Lee Dye in a piece from 2010. For more on the perils of assigning human qualities to other animal species, I highly recommend checking out Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy’s When Elephants Weep.
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Im in ur wasteland
Imagine if Shakespeare had written Pulp Fiction? Or if LOLcats had written “The Waste Land“?
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The Alligators of Abraham
You can listen to Robert Kloss read from The Alligators of Abraham, which was released last Thursday from Mud Luscious Press. The author also composed a playlist to accompany his book. The gorgeous text has been receiving much-deserved advance praise, and it’s even borne a “series of texts – videos, art, stories, and more – written, filmed, cobbled together, and razed by different artists from around the literary world.”
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Editors on Deck
Adweek engages in a little inside-baseball speculation, wondering who would be in line to take over at, say, the New Yorker if David Remnick were to step down and who might be next in line for Graydon Carter’s gig at Vanity Fair?
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What We Need Is
You may have heard about Google Poetics, which compiles Google Autocomplete entries that add up to a Horse_ebooks-like whole. At The Toast, Emma Jones takes these entries and writes them up as poetry proper.
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Dedicated Fans of that Old Book Smell
The British Library paid £9m to buy a copy of St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest intact European book in existence.
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