“Over four seasons, ‘Younger’ became a ‘Gossip Girl’ for the publishing industry—a glossy, winking take on a bounded universe of writers and editors and marketing campaigns.” If you need a show and love literary references, Younger might be the way to go.
xoxo Liza
New Experimental Fiction
Angela Stubbs at The Nervous Breakdown examines current experimental fiction and the New Narrative movement through the work of Dodie Bellamy, Kirsten Kaschock, Julie P. Enzser and Aimee Bender.
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“I wanted to write about the feeling of life. Not life as an intellectual process, or a concept, but as a feeling.”
Tom Murphy, arguably Ireland’s greatest living playwright, joins The Paris Review for an interview about his life, his influences, and his rage.
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The E-Reader and Tablet Tidal Wave
Pew Internet finds that tablet and e-reader ownership nearly doubled over the holiday gift-giving period 29% of Americans now own at least one of these digital reading devices. Meanwhile, the content producers keep rushing in, with NBC Universal launching an e-book arm and Apple’s textbook scheme netting 350,000 downloads in three days.
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Karen Russell and the Hungry Ghosts
Karen Russell recounts finishing her book in the midst of pregnancy, and the financial and time calculations that must be done to get to that last page.
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Lit Kids, Ctd.
Last Tuesday, I wrote about an article in the Literary Review that shed light on the daughters of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Now, in the LRB, Tim Parks reviews a new biography of the children of Charles Dickens. (Related: our own Mark O’Connell reviewed Mr. Parks’s new book.)
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The 2013 Bad Sex Awards
It’s not Christmas, but it’s close. It’s time for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Award Shortlist to be released. This year’s finalists include My Education author Susan Choi and famous folk singer Woody Guthrie among others, and the winner(?) will be announced on December 3rd. (Bonus: Their Twitter account is sharing particularly awful excerpts as well.)
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87 Years Delayed: New Zora Neale Hurston
New York Magazine has an excerpt up from Zora Neale Hurston‘s long-lost manuscript, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, the first-person account of Cudjo Lewis, the only living survivor of the final slave ship to land in America. Barracoon will finally, 87 years later, be published next week.
Telling the Truth
“There is no such thing as a true story. I know this because my daughter insists I told her to put her dirty dishes in the sink when I know I told her to put them in the dishwasher.” Over at The Rumpus, Ellen Urbani writes about telling the truth.
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