This week, I asked Becky Tuch to respond to some common misconceptions about literary magazines. Here are her responses. 1. No one reads them. Literary magazines may not have a mainstream audience. But they do have a very specific and enthusiastic audience. Their readers are poets, lovers of the short story, admirers of flash fiction,…
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore Robin Sloan Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2012 288 pages $25.00 What: a book about books And: their simultaneous demise and triumph And, obviously: immortality Who: Clay Jannon, night shift clerk at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore And: his quest to understand Mr. Penumbra’s bizarre and cultish dealings And: his desire to…
There was a time I traveled without checking in luggage. Business trips. Harrowing schedules. No time to wait at carousels when you could be speeding to your next meeting to harass a supplier or fawn over a client. Now that I’ve left that life behind in favor of this lit, lit one, I travel with…
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our…
The nineteen year old that I work with setting up the Hydration Stations on the Lakefront path told me that this was her second job ever and that she wanted to do really well because she saw a future with the company. I scoffed at her in exactly the same way I’ve scoffed at people…
Growing up, I never knew it was possible to be a writer. No one in my family ever talked about reading books, never mind writing them. It wasn’t until September of my senior year in high school that I discovered that Barnes and Noble was a bookstore and not a furniture store. The library? That…
This Is How You Lose Her Junot Diaz Riverhead, September 2012 224 pages $26.95 Full disclosure: I heart Junot Diaz. A lot. I’m not alone, of course. His previous efforts, Drown and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, have attracted the kind of visceral praise usually reserved for rock stars: “powerful,”…
Good morning. It’s a day for an air walk on that lit, lit sojourn. Coffee? Here’s the view above my tatami mat, one of Liu Zhen’s “Landscapes of the Mind,” a lacquer painting. Liu Zhen is a talented, and unusual, young (b. 1970) Shanghai-based artist. Unusual for his patience in one so young. Working with…
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on…
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