In our Roundups segment, we’re looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. We explore posts from our archives as well as other top literary magazines and websites, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week.
If Grease has taught us anything, it’s that summer is the time for lovin’, and if your inbox has taught you anything, it’s that wedding season is upon us. Here’s a roundup of posts about the often volatile, sometimes emotional, and ever dynamic relationships between writers, readers, and work.
“…you’re getting this letter because you put yourself out there. Read it, think about it, and put yourself out there again,” advises Eric Weinstein in What Rejection Means to Me.
“Those first pages help me decide if the book and I would make a great couple. Do I want to take it out for coffee or tea?” muses Thien-Kim in “When Do You Break Up With Your Book?”
“Whether it is fatigue, disgust, or something in between, the breakup is because something is broken between the author and the reader,” directs Robin Bradford in It’s Not Me, It’s You: Breaking Up With An Author.
Remember, as Chekhov once wrote to a friend, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.”
Noah Warren’s new poetry collection opens with “Preface to the Second Edition.” What’s been excluded from this edition—words that may have been included in the imagined first edition—and what’s been included to shape a different experience of encountering these words in this specific order: it’s all impossible knowledge.
Adam Zagajewski’s “To Go to Lvov” is an elegy for a world, a family, a time, that will never return, but is chronicled with such fevered longing, such attentive encapsulation, that it somehow lives on.
