Poets and Writers sits down with Year in Reading alumnus Saeed Jones to talk writing, publishing, and BuzzFeed. “Creating change is about having a critical mass of several influences, but one is the right people, and creating a space where people feel that they can speak up and have these conversations and experiment.”
Saeed Jones on Creating Change
“Kind of like gothic mansions”
Recommended Reading: Eric Farwell sits down with John Darnielle (aka The Mountain Goats) at Bookforum. You could also check out Darnielle's Year in Reading piece.
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Books without Covers
In the New York Times, Mokoto Rich highlights the superfluousness of book covers in the digital age and the marketing challenges that result. cf. "Ether Between the Covers: Gifting Books in a Digital Age."
Things Look Up
Recommended Reading: Oliver Burkeman on a new group of optimistic thinkers.
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A Brief History of Gay Liberation
“If the taglines used to market lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans to the country’s mainstream—‘Love Wins,’ ‘It Gets Better,’ and ‘You Can Play’—have led to unprecedented levels of inclusion and visibility, it is precisely by shoving sex aside and presenting gay people and straight people as essentially the same at heart. In the process, as the outsider status attached to being gay disappears in more and more contexts, some of gay culture’s radical roots risk being expunged from memory.” On Jim Downs’s Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation.
A Cure for Writer’s Block
"Don’t discount the two greatest cures for [writer's] Block: plagiarism and suicide." Joshua Cohen dispenses some curious advice to writers at Ask the Paris Review.
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Comma Confessional
"One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, Midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience. The popular image of the copy editor is of someone who favors rigid consistency. I don’t usually think of myself that way. But, when pressed, I do find I have strong views about commas." Mary Norris's "Confessions of a Comma Queen," from the New Yorker.