“0.5 hrs: Read this week’s New Yorker fiction. 0.7 hrs: Hated on New Yorker writer with her derivative characters & mise-en-scenes. 0.1 hrs: Looked up ‘mise-en-scene’ on Wikipedia. 1.3 hrs: Phone call with writer friend; discussed how much New Yorker fiction sucks. 0.5 hrs: Drafted & emailed query letter to New Yorker (for super postmodern story).” The good people at McSweeney’s imagine an impossibly tedious world where writers and poets bill by the hour.
Cocktail Hour
Cowboys and Indians?
“Even if they have to fly to Pakistan to do it, our cowboys are always hunting Indians.” Amira Jarmakani on the perpetuation of Wild West stories even though our idea of the frontier has changed.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Levine; Birch; Wieringa; Boland; Plumly
Out this week: My Lost Poets by Philip Levine; Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch; These Are the Names by Tommy Wieringa; A Poet’s Dublin by Eavan Boland; and Against Sunset by Stanley Plumly. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest fiction and nonfiction book previews.
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More like Readit, ha ha.
Since writing a plea for a YouTube lit category in Fiction Circus (which we discussed on our Tumblr), Miracle Jones has built a Reddit thread for literary videos.
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Langewiesche on the Chilean Miners
The Outlaw Sea author William Langewiesche has a new ebook out in the “Single” format, Finding the Devil: Darkness, Light, and the Untold Story of the Chilean Mine Disaster, about the 2010 disaster that left 33 miners trapped for nearly two months.
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Post-Lit
Though Kim Gordon is mostly known for her time in Sonic Youth, she’s also an artist and writer, one who’s racked up art projects and publications over the course of the past forty years. At Full-Stop, Hestia Peppe reviews Is It My Body?, a new collection of Gordon’s essays and other written work. It might also be a good time to read our own Anne K. Yoder on punk and revolutionary nonfiction.
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When Good Things Happen to Bad People
When Good Things Happen to Bad People: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. On one of our favorite industry blogs, The Rejectionist weighs in on one of publishing’s perennial problems: what to do when someone really foul ends up being way more successful than you are.