The Magnificent

After fourteen years, Bookslut is closing its doors. In a post that went up on March 9th, founder Jessa Crispin announced that the blog she started when she was twenty-three, which made a name for itself as one of the first major book sites on the web, is ceasing publication as of tomorrow, May 6th. She talks with Boris Kachka at Vulture about why it's closing, what she's learned about the publishing world, and what it was like when she started: "People who started blogging even a year after us didn’t have the same response because the audience got divided."

The New York Review of Tweets. The London Review of Breakfasts.

"If you have a story to tell the world, please consider improving your craft and seriously pursuing publication. Your voice matters; add it to the narrative." A list of "bookish ways to fight the good fight" from BookRiot.

Slate offers up a treatise on "the greatness of gin." (via my friend Derek, who wrote: "for your book blog; there is too little booze on it")

Over at Ploughshares, Daniel Peña traces a parallel between Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Gloria Anzaldúa’s hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. As he puts it, “To separate Anzaldúa from the larger canon (and subsequently from those books she influenced) is to ignore her contribution to American literature. It’s to say she doesn’t belong in that kind of highbrow conversation, which she so obviously does—even Nelson acknowledges that she does.”