Katharine Beutner's Blog, page 20

Sunday links

This interview with Cormac McCarthy is wonderful, thorough and crotchety, and since I'm not much a short-story writer myself, I'm oddly heartened by his lack of interest in writing them, or in delving into collaborative work in Hollywood, etc.:

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

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WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write...

PW weighs in

A driveby post to note that Alcestis got a pretty nice review in Publishers Weekly today! I saw this immediately before teaching this morning and had to restrain myself from starting class with, "HEY GUYS GUESS WHAT–"

Short story recommendation

Via Elizabeth McCracken on Twitter, I found Edan Lepucki's story "I Am the Lion Now", up now at Narrative. A few paragraphs from it:

Margaret thought she heard a suppressed roar coming from the kitchen. Before the turgid novel, she'd been reading a book about the history of al Qaeda; in it, the author told about Taliban members who had broken into an Afghan zoo. One man decreed the bear's "beard" too short and cut off the animal's nose; another zealot leaped into the lion's den yelling, "I am...

A quick post about Scholastic & 'Luv Ya Bunches'

Scholastic Books has chosen to leave Lauren Myracle's Luv Ya Bunches out of its Book Fair catalogue after Myracle refused to transform a character's lesbian parents into a straight couple. The book is still available through Scholastic's book club catalogue, but, as Mombian points out, the book fair is far more successful than the book club. (See also Lee Wind's post on Scholastic's decision.) Scholastic claims that they're not censoring the book because it's still available to students...

anecdotes about anecdotes

My blog is called "Anecdotes" because of Hester Thrale Piozzi's Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. When I named it that, I never really thought about the traffic it might generate. But I get a continuous stream of hits from search strings about anecdotes. Around May and June, "anecdotes about graduation" is always a popular one — I guess it's really hard to write a graduation speech without borrowing some stories? But I think my favorite of all time was: "anecdotes about me."

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I...

National Coming Out Day

Today is National Coming Out Day. When I was a Smith student, this was celebrated by lots of supportive chalking all over campus ("Come out, come out, whoever you are") and by an outdoor celebration at night. All the houses set up tables and handed out fliers and candy and stickers — my house made labels one year, and encouraged people to wear as many as possible. My friend A. ended up being something like "femme top queer lesbian dominant queen," I think. Girls who started the day with...

Letter writing for hire in NYC

A quick followup to my recent post about hack writers: this story, from the New Yorker's Book Bench blog, about a woman writer setting up "a small letter-writing stand in Union Square."

She sat behind a small Lettera typewriter and a cardboard menu listing your options: you had to first chose your language (English or Spanish), type of letter (regular letter for $2, love letter for $3, illicit love letter for $5, postage included), and type of paper (blue, yellow, or onion). Some customers...

Hacks of all kinds

David Barnett has a great blog post at the Guardian today entitled What's wrong with being a hack? Since my academic work focuses on professional women writers of the early eighteenth century — the era of Grub Street, paper wars, and slipping emetics into your literary enemies' drinks, if you happened to be Alexander Pope — I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about hackery.

Some of the writers I study are refreshingly honest about their status as hack writers; Laetitia Pilkington, in...

Happy 300, Dr. Johnson

The DNB offers one entry free to the non-paying public daily, and today it's my BFF Dr. Samuel Johnson, born on 18 September 1709. If you haven't read his Preface to Shakespeare, I highly recommend it — it was one of the first things that got me hooked on eighteenth century literature.

(Did you know that Johnson, Hester Thrale and Boswell all have Twitter accounts?)

Story rec

A quick post just to recommend Sarah Rees Brennan's latest short story offering, "The Arundel Tomb." I haven't yet had a chance to read her The Demon's Lexicon, which is waiting for me on my Kindle, but I really liked this story. Lately I've been thinking a lot about "golden age" stories, stories that begin with a period of grace and love and togetherness and then proceed to dash that all to bits. Without being too spoilery, Brideshead Revisited is a good example — and so, in a more...