Recommended Reading: On Chuck Tingle, self-published writer of gay erotica, who beat the notorious Sad Puppies at their own game: “Question: If you could pick a single writer to make an effective, compassionate statement about identity politics to a divided literary community, who would you pick? Would it be a schizophrenic, autistic person who’d authored an e-book called Space Raptor Butt Invasion?”
Feel the Tingle?
Decolonizing Our Shelves
“… Stop talking about diversity and start decolonizing our shelves.”At the Winter Institute 2018 (Wi13), keynote speaker Junot Diaz lambasted the publishing industry for talking — but doing little else — about diversity in literature, and implored librarians and booksellers to fill their shelves with diverse books. From our archives: an essay on race, gender, and Diaz’s writing.
Pulp and Not
Is “literary” fiction just a product of clever marketing? Elizabeth Edmondson thinks it is. At The Guardian, she argues that classically literary authors like Jane Austen had no idea they were writing Literature — posterity classified their work as such later on. Her essay dovetails nicely with our own Edan Lepucki’s argument that literature is a genre.
Now on Kindle
Three days after Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times wrote about Katharine Weymouth taking over the Washington Post, Jeff Farhi reports that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has agreed to purchase the newspaper. Will Bezos follow up his purchase of English™ with a brand-new WaPo style guide?
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The Real 24-Hour Bookstore
At one point, the only 24-hour bookstore was in Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but Beijing has the first real 24-hour bookstore. The Sanlian Bookstore will be open around the clock for book lovers and insomniacs alike.
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My Life, Abridged
Chekhov never published an autobiography, but he did once write a letter in which, in Chekhovian fashion, he summed up his life in a paragraph. At The Paris Review Daily, you can read the Constance Garnett translation of this letter in full. You could also check out Brendan Mathews on reading Chekhov for self-improvement.
Biography: The Story of Our Times
“There is one rule [to writing biography] that all who try their hand at it come to know: until the protagonist reveals his or her character—his or her inner self—what the biographer produces is less a life than a report, an autopsy rather than the record of a séance.” David Levering Lewis writes for The American Scholar about biography and writing “the lives of African-American figures, and [finding] in them the story of our times.”