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For years, I finished every book I started. Short collections, slim volumes of poetry, novels fat with lyricism, the latest tome from Neal Stephenson—I soldiered through them all. Then, a few years out of grad school, on my morning bus ride to work, I found myself falling asleep in the same three paragraph stretch of…
In recent years, most literary journals have begun to accept online submissions through popular managers like Submittable–many, too, have begun to only accept submissions in this way, eschewing the old-guard snail-mail submission method entirely. This new approach certainly has its upsides–in many cases the switch has resulted in faster response times, often more organized editorial…
Brazil’s L&PM Editores recently launched an exciting new venture, Ticket Books–an inventive new way to get books to people: re-releasing ten beloved print titles that double as subway tickets in São Paulo. Each of the books, which were chosen across genres–from Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to collected Peanuts…
Amazon is suing over one thousand people who used Fiverr, the odd-jobs website for digital tasks, to offer paid fake product reviews at the site. The lawsuit alleges that “defendants are misleading Amazon’s customers and tarnishing Amazon’s brand for their own profit and the profit of a handful of dishonest sellers and manufacturers.” Some fake reviewers…
Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems Billy Collins Random House, October 2013 288 Pages $16.00 Buy: book | ebook Three thousand miles away from my library—most of it translated literature, most of it tortuously postmodern—I turned in a lonely hour to my dad’s hardcover copy of Billy Collins’ Aimless Love. I’d never read much of…
It’s mid-October, and some of us are gearing up for NaNoWriMo, or NaNonWriMo. Some of us are just inspired by the changing seasons, and want to finally try some new thing we keep putting off. Or maybe we just want to actually read one of the books stacked on our nightstands. Unfortunately, we writers humans have an endearing habit of envisioning grand creative plans,…
I’m going to let you in on a little secret about the submissions in my slush pile. When one comes in, the first thing I do–before I have even read the first sentence of the letter–is skim it for the name of a publication I recognize. If I don’t see one, I go back and…
Having long hated the term “bucket list,” and having nevertheless thought about making one for myself (#MomentsOfWeakness), I was a complete sucker for Rebecca Mead’s recent New Yorker essay in which she questions its merits. In “Kicking the Bucket List,” Mead asks whether such a list actually helps us carpe diem-ize our otherwise thoughtless lives, arguing that it can instead turn sought-after moments into…
When I first start working on a proposal or a manuscript with a writer, I tell them I have two stages of advice: breaking things and fixing things. At first, I’m going to keep asking hard questions and recommending big changes, until I think the writer has said what that writer wanted to say. Once we’ve gotten all…
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