“We lived in the Midlands, and when I moved to Dublin for university Frank liked to call me up and talk to me about my late mother, whom he informed me was ‘no saint’.” Sally Rooney’s short story from the New Irish Writing issue of Granta is now available on the Literary Hub website.
A Prodigal Daughter
Something To Think About This Sunday
Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo author Mark Bowden explains the "hardest job in football" in this Atlantic article from 2009.
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Very Short Story Contest
Want a chance to win $200 and a shot at glory? Consider entering The Coffin Factory’s “Very Short Story Contest.” The deadline is August 15th.
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The magical realists were right.
It’s raining cats and dogs and spiders and frogs and scarlet worms and fish. No, really. It is.
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On the Stupidity of Entitlement
Year in Reading alumna Ottessa Moshfegh has a new story in this week’s issue of the New Yorker, titled “The Beach Boy.” Moshfegh also spoke with Deborah Treisman about her writing: “Isn’t it hilarious when people are blind to their own arrogance? For some, no amount of American liberal-arts education, charitable contributions, or hours spent listening to NPR will ever wake them up to their own privileged, bigoted, and classist attitudes. [...] One might say that New Yorkers like the folks in 'The Beach Boy' are especially susceptible to the kind of stupidity I love to write about—the stupidity of entitlement.”
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Book Scrapping
Not enough shelf space? Pay the people at 1DollarScan to scan and digitize your paper books into searchable PDF files for $1/100 pages.
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Great, Just Great
Buzzfeed kicked up a storm on Thursday when its first-ever Buzzfeed Books editor, Isaac Fitzgerald, told Poynter that the site’s new vertical won’t publish negative reviews. Invoking the “Bambi rule," Fitzgerald argued that he sees no point “[wasting] breath talking smack about something.” At The Atlantic Wire, Eric Levenson published a counterpoint, while Alexanda Petri poked fun at Fitzgerald in the WaPo.
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Research
Two weeks ago, Tod Goldberg came out with a new novel, Gangsterland, that centers on a hit man in the Chicago Mafia. At The Nervous Breakdown, you can read an excerpt of the novel, as well as one of their trademark self-interviews, in which Goldberg explains that for the past three years, he’s been “writing and writing and writing. But sometimes, that just means I’m not writing at all.” You could also read the author’s dispatch from AWP.
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