The Bodleian Library has digitized Mary Shelley’s notebooks containing Frankenstein.
Frankenstein Survives
The Craven
Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "the jingle-man." Henry James called his work "decidedly primitive." Yet Edgar Allan Poe, nearly two centuries after his death, is now acclaimed as a writer on par with his best contemporaries. How did his reputation evolve? In the Times Literary Supplement, Marjorie Perloff reviews a new study of Poe by Jerome McGann.
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Reading Through Trauma
“My whole life, I had used stories, both my own and other people’s, to check out of grocery store lines and long bus trips, stints in doctors’ waiting rooms, heartache, my own depression, and finally of the tedious exhaustion of new motherhood. Now, here I was in this 15-by-20 room, where monitors and alarms were constantly beeping, and there was no way out, except the unimaginable.” Alyson Foster, author of Heart Attack Watch, writes about her son’s illness and her love of reading.
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Fair Warning for Writers
Joe Hiland, The Indiana Review's fiction editor, has some advice for writers who submit to his (or any) magazine. He also lists "the three types of stories I most often reject because I feel like I’ve read them before."
Bad from Good
Sometimes good writers write very badly. As evidence, Literary Hub has collected samples of bad writing from the likes of Year in Reading alum Isaac Fitzgerald and Daniel Clowes, who we interviewed here.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Hadley; Hunt; Aboulela; Bohjalian; Tarkington; Lambert; Morris; Hawdon
Out this week: The Past by Tessa Hadley; Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt; The Kindness of Enemies by Leila Aboulela; The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian; Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Ed Tarkington; The Children's Home by Charles Lambert; Travelers Rest by Keith Lee Morris; and Jakob's Colors by Lindsay Hawdon. For more on these and other new titles, check out our just-published Book Preview.
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The Gifts of Workshop
A translation guide to writing workshops that we're definitely printing out and bringing along to our next one. "Sometimes when people say 'show, don’t tell,' what they mean is that they find the characters sympathetic, the story is moving forward, and they even like the conflict, but they just don’t like the way you wrote it. What they’d really like to do is steal the idea and write it themselves, because honestly, they would do a much better job."
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