Millions staffer Edan Lepucki contributed “Chorus” to Slate‘s Trump Story Project, an ongoing series of short fiction pieces written by contemporary authors.
“The chorus needs to be real to make this work.”
Puffed Up
Don’t blame Amazon or Goodreads for authors writing rave reviews of their own work. Writers have been self-promoting since the 1700s, when it was called “puffery.” As Nicholas Mason writes for Symposium Magazine, “Nearly every British writer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries either participated in or benefitted from ginned-up book reviews.” The list of puffed up authors includes Mary Wollstonecraft, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley.
Since You Asked
Recommended Reading: On terrible writing advice from famous writers.
The Legacy of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Tweet to Win
Electric Literature and Colson Whitehead are holding a Twitter contest. Best tweet on the theme #stuffmymusesays wins a Sony Reader.
“I know what’s next— / the horns, the hymns.”
Recommended Reading: “Epistrophy” by Jake Adam York, who passed away last December.
So do we drop the ‘Y’ in YBA now?
Gearing up for his forthcoming retrospective at the Tate Modern, Damien Hirst told the Guardian that he “still believe[s] art is more powerful than money.” This from the man whose tiger shark and formaldehyde sculpture “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” sold for $12 million– the figure that Don Thompson reports in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark.