Steel your nerve, readers! Kim Liao at The Literary Hub thinks that everyone should shoot for at least 100 rejections per year. At least some of the satisfaction, she argues, lies in knowing that “in the towering waves of slush, be it high tide or low tide, my own modest submission is out there, like a tiny sailboat, bobbing afloat.”
Bring On The Rejection
Our Lucrative Profession
The folks at Harper’s Bazaar (not Harper’s Magazine) are launching a new short story competition, and the grand prize is wild: an all-expenses-paid weeklong stay on a private Scottish island, publication in the May 2014 issue of the magazine and a first-edition book from the Asprey’s Fine and Rare Books Department, worth up to £3,000. (And yes, that’s pounds, not dollars.)
Racist Tintin?
Does the Adventures of Tintin film conveniently avoid the comic books’ racist undertones?
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Also, Empathy
Recommended Reading: In The Atlantic, Alaa Al Aswany shows how literature can inspire empathy by analyzing one word, “also,” in Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead. Al Aswany also has a new book out this week, featured in our latest New Release Day.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sorokin, Perec, O’Nan
Out this week is Russian author Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik. Coinciding with that release, NYRB Classics is putting out Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy. Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is now on shelves, as is Stewart O’Nan’s Emily, Alone, in which he revisits the Maxwell family from his 2002 book Wish You Were Here.
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Whose Hasn’t?
Sergey Stefanovich’s “The Library” takes viewers through Duncan Fallowell’s library “which has spilled over into every available space and become an art installation in its own right.”
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The Duty of Storytelling
“I don’t try to deliver a message, teach, inform or ‘give back’ in my books. I simply want to tell a story. My writing is totally separated from my activism and social service, which are channeled through my Foundation.” Megan Bradshaw interviews Isabel Allende for Asymptote Journal.
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Picador’s Tumblr Makes Up For Lost Time
The Picador folks joined Tumblr recently (like we asked) and they’re making up for lost time already. They’ve already instituted something called “Sunday Sontag,” and they’ve posted a Spotify playlist comprised of 140 “contextually literary” tracks.
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