“Without your micro-fiction, we’re like a flightless bird, sauceless noodles, or decarbonated LaCroix. We loved the response to our last contest so much that, naturally, we’re having another one.” Submit your 200-word stories of separation to Paper Darts for its second annual micro-fiction award, judged this time around by Lesley Nneka Arimah (whose What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky graced our most-anticipated list for the first half of this year).
There’s Even a Cash Prize
Race, Decolonial Love, and Junot Díaz
If I Were President
What would Geoffrey Canada, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Jennifer Egan do in America’s highest office?
Indie History
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Voices in Asian-Anglophone Fiction
This week in the New Yorker Jane Hu analyzes the “dispassionate first-person narrators” prominent in works by English-speaking Asian authors and questions whether that makes it easier to identify with the narrator. She uses Chemistry by NBA 5 under 35 honoree Weike Wang as an example along with other recent works. “Against this tradition, there is, perhaps, another emerging, of Asian-Anglophone writers who both play with and thus begin to undo these tropes of Asian impersonality. The novels by Ishiguro, Park, Lin, and Wang all feature first-person narrators who keep their distance—actively denying readers direct interior access. This is true, it’s important to note, even when the characters they write are not themselves Asian.”
“Media hype and unusual advertisements”
The Los Angeles Review of Books interviewed Xujun Eberlein, a “China-born and now Boston-based” short story writer, essayist and blogger about recent literary happenings in her native country. The first question they asked has to do with Finnegans Wake, which is selling surprisingly well in Chinese bookstores.
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Books, Charity, and Africa
The Hipster Book Club is doing a literary-themed charity drive for the famine in the Horn of Africa.
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The Real Deal
“Now, I’m not going to lie. It’s annoying, to have to take time out of my incredibly busy writing schedule in order to spell it all out for young people, just because they spend most of their daylight hours being urged by hoary old theorists in threadbare sweaters to write experimental fiction that will never sell. But I care deeply about the young—all of them, the world’s young—so of course I am humbled and honored to share the trade secrets embedded in my rigorous daily work schedule.” Heather Havrilesky on her writing life.