Music For Writers: Cerrone’s ‘Cities’ Of Ancient Urban Mythology

Turn Off The Lights I have to agree with Tony Frankel at Stage and Cinema on this one: Get into your headphones and shut your eyes. Invisible Cities wants to live inside your head. And the darker that place might be, the better. Never in all my travels had I ventured as far as Adelma.… Read More

Picador Champions ‘Station Eleven’

“Hell Is Flutes” A writer who can pry that paraphrase from the jaws of Jean-Paul Satre’s “hell is other people” certainly has some chops. If she can then deliver it as a genuinely funny laugh line amid a global Huis Clos 20 years after the collapse of human civilization, she’s no slouch. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven may hand her… Read More

The Muse’s Town Hall: Jane Friedman on Literary in Digital Times

Jane Friedman: “Thoughtful, intelligent ‘literary’ work is doing quite well digitally if you step away from book-length or novel publishing and into journalism-driven or nonfiction-driven publishing…I wish there were a community aspect to it (maybe there will be), which the literary world needs. Where’s the literary person’s version of Wattpad? Does that even make sense? I’m… Read More

The Literary Elitism Question

As Laura Miller at Salon opens her own reflection on this, “Is the Literary World Elitist?”, she rightly explains that Eleanor Catton—responding to an instance of reader indignation at writer’s use of a 50-cents word—”treats the reader’s ire as a symptom of the creeping consumerist attitude in our response to literature.” Read More

Charleston’s PubSmart Joins Conference Row

Pub­S­mart may be cre­at­ing some­thing we’ve needed to see much more of: a con­fer­ence in which not only business-conscious authors but also smaller pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies can start doing the log­i­cal net­work­ing they’ve needed: with each other. Read More