“Save everything, she said. Everything. When your archive gets bought, they pay by the cubic foot.” Sarah Manguso in The New York Times about drafts in an era of digital writing. And while we’re on the subject , here’s what Ben Fountain, Emily St. John Mandel, Emma Straub and a passel of other writers have to say about writing that elusive first draft.
To Save a Draft
Dictionary of Regional @English
I snum! This is a bunch of bullcorn. You chowderheads best move your gogos and follow the Dictionary of American Regional English on Twitter.
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“Music and Memory” Playlists
Granta asks past contributors for short playlists of songs on the theme of memory. Last week features selections by Aimee Bender, Isobel Dixon, and Adam Mars-Jones; weeks past include playlists from Jeffrey Eugenides, Lorrie Moore, and Wells Tower.
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Mathias Svalina New Release
Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books co-editor Mathias Svalina‘s latest book I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur was released last month. You can read an excerpt here, or you can check out his short story “The Pregnant Couple” on Matchbook’s website.
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“What’d You Major In?” “Big Literary Data.”
John Sunyer checks in with Franco Moretti at the Stanford Literary Lab. Moretti, a 63-year-old professor of English, is the author of Distant Reading – a book in which he lays out his long-held belief that “literary study doesn’t require scholars to actually read the books.” Rather, he believes in a “new approach to literature [that] depends on computers to crunch ‘big data,’ or stores of massive amounts of information, to produce new insights.”
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I Turn My Camera On
When does photojournalism become exploitive? At Granta, a podcast examining the ethics of photojournalism.