[Link] New literary podcasts to add to your queue

by Brittany Allen

Say you’re no newb to the literary podcast. You’ve got Brad Listi’s “Other Ppl,” “Between the Covers,” and “The Maris Review,” sitting pride of place in your digital library. And—perhaps inspired by this very website—you’ve been tickling your cochlea lately with episodes of Merve Emre’s new show, “The Critic and Her Publics.” But maybe these offerings are but a first course to what might ideally be a banquet. After all, if you can’t actually be reading every hour of the day, listening to smart people talk about reading may be the next best thing.

In case you agree with the previous statement, I’ve rounded up a few literary podcasts to add to your radar. You can check out these fine shows on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your own sneaky means.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/new-literary-podcasts-to-add-to-your-queue/

[Link] How librarians saved the day in World War II

by Brittany Allen

In her new book, Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, scholar Elyse Graham explores the secret history of U.S. intelligence and lays out yet another reason why you should thank a librarian today: their top-tier spywork.

The nascent Central Intelligence Agency—then called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—had a lot of high profile help during World War II. Actors like Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, and Josephine Baker worked their connections to gain information for the Allies, ferret intel through Vichy, and tamper with German morale.

Ian Fleming, author of the Bond books, pioneered the nutty Operation MINCEMEAT while serving with MI-5. And Julia Child, who you may know better for her butter addiction, helped develop a recipe for shark repellent in her first life at the OSS.

But the intelligence game didn’t start so glamorous. Well before the organization got into fancy “operations,” an initial fleet of motley pencil-pushers were tasked with analyzing raw data. And as Graham’s book shows—and contra to Hollywood’s determined interventions—this kind of spy work was generally low octane. More puzzle-solving, less planting of bombs.

In a New Republic review of Book and Dagger, Greg Barnhisel observes that “humanists and their comma-hunting, cross-referencing, collecting, and cataloging ways” were especially suited to this kind of spying. Which is why the OSS sought out “librarians, archivists, mathematicians, and anthropologists” to do its first dirty work.

These were the so-called “chairborne,” of the Research and Analysis division. Hitler called them the Tintenritter, or “ink knights.”

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/how-librarians-saved-the-day-in-world-war-ii/

[Link] Forever Faithful To a Single Story: An Ode to Monogamous Writing

“It was never about setting out to write a book—the point all along was to write this book.”

by Amy Gallo Ryan

There seems to be a single answer to every predicament in which a writer might find herself; reached an impasse in your manuscript? Start something new. Need a distraction when you’re out on sub? Start something new. In a lull after your project sold? Oh, here’s an idea; start. something. new. 

Yet as each of those occasions arrived, I did no such thing. For the past decade, rather than splinter my attention, accumulating second and third manuscripts in a drawer somewhere, I’ve had eyes for only one. That book hits shelves this week and given the many moments of stillness throughout the process of writing, querying, submitting, rewriting, tweaking and revising, it strikes me now as quite remarkable that I’ve managed to permanently avoid starting something new.

Each time I refused to redirect my gaze, I gained a greater understanding of my commitment, my tenacity, the wholeness of my belief in what this story should be.

I’m certainly aware of the advantages of being a writer with a drawer full of projects. More manuscripts mean improved odds for publication, to say nothing of the allure of distraction; when you’re stuck or bored or striking out, what could be more illuminating or productive than redirecting your attention, dazzling your brain with an entirely new set of words and ideas. I have a screenwriter friend whose head is full of such abundance. She concocts story after story, and then, perhaps even more impressively, actually writes them into existence. When we exchange updates on our work I have to qualify my questions, saying things like, “what’s happening with the one about…” and “which actress is reading the one where…” I have such deep admiration for her and for everyone whose drawers are stuffed with pages; mine contain stray batteries and Forever stamps.

I was told in a lecture once that the quality distinguishing a writer from an editor was that a writer couldn’t help but write. Putting pen to paper was a fact of existence, a matter of necessity. Who among us had a little pad on our nightstand, a stack of swollen notebooks beneath our bed, pages puffy with scrawl? The distinction has lived rent free in my mind ever since, just the lifetime supply of fuel my imposter syndrome needed.

Because the truth is that for ten whole years my writing has consisted of a solitary project.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/forever-faithful-to-a-single-story-an-ode-to-monogamous-writing/

[Link] Dear Bill: Letters From a Young John Updike to His Editor, William Maxwell

Sandy Island, NH
July 30, 1953
Mr. William Maxwell
The New Yorker
25 West 43rd Street
New York, New York

Dear Mr. Maxwell:

Your two letters on the twenty-third were the nicest thing that has happened to me since I began mailing material away five years ago. Thanks a lot for your interest.

I will, of course, try to send you more light verse. The shortages (time, electricity, inspiration) up here may have made me unusually somber, but I am still convinced that the kindest possible way of earning a living is to be a humorist.

Sincerely,

John Updike
with
“Boy Playing Basketball…”
“City Vista”
“The Summer Reader”

_________________________________________________

213 Iffley Road, Oxford
October 4, 1954

Dear Mr. Maxwell:

I’m pretty embarrassed. In a rather garrulous letter I wrote Mrs. White this morning, I suggested there would be some noise from me concerning the galley proof of my story. But I’ve just read the proof, and the only improvement I can suggest is that “Friends” be spelled correctly in the title. Otherwise, it read slick as a whistle. I’m sure it isn’t the way I wrote it, quite, but there was no pain at all, so it must be the way I had wanted to write it. I can scarcely wait until it appears.

I’m sure it isn’t the way I wrote it, quite, but there was no pain at all, so it must be the way I had wanted to write it.

The first and last sentences gave me momentary pause. But it is a good idea to establish the time, the so-called “odd hour” right off the bat, and I suppose the kid would be aware of the time even though, as he later points out, he has no wristwatch. And the wine at the end sounds grand—not too grand, I hope, for a liquor store. But I’m sure it isn’t: The New Yorker’s care over details like that is legendary. The fastidious substitution of a “red foil cap” for my cork, or whatever, gave me exquisite pleasure.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/dear-bill-letters-from-a-young-john-updike-to-his-editor-william-maxwell/

[Link] To Haunt and Be Haunted: On the Exhumation of Edgar Allen Poe

by Ed Simon

Don’t question the specifics, whether you’ve been kidnapped or unfortunate enough to fall victim to poorly trained pathologists and morticians, for either way you’ve been entombed in the cold earth while still breathing. Just imagine it—you’d abruptly awaken in the darkness, a blackness that’s so all-consuming that your eyes could never adjust beneath the earth’s chill frost line.

Deprived of the sense of sight, but able to hear the shifting of ground on the other side of the coffin’s thin wood, you’d of course panic, but you wouldn’t be able to sit up, or even necessarily raise your arms. You’d fruitlessly knock and scratch at the hard maple less than a foot, maybe only a few inches, from your face. The six feet of dirt separating you from the fresh air of freedom could weigh as much as fifteen thousand pounds so that even if you tried to break through it would be futile.

At best you’d breach the lid, and all of that dirt would cave in and suffocate you quickly, which might be merciful. A person could survive between five and six hours after being buried alive, though panicked scrambling and hyperventilating would deplete the available oxygen quickly.

Eventually, assuming that you didn’t have a heart attack, you’d be suffocated by the increasing carbon dioxide. All of that dirt wouldn’t entirely dampen the sound of your screaming, so there’s always the chance some benevolent gravedigger could save you. Unless he’s the one who buried you to begin with.

There was, as with many of those living in the gloaming aesthetic twilight of Romanticism, a tendency to confuse the characters with their creator, a narrator with the author.

“There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are entirely too horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in his 1844 short story “The Premature Burial,” first printed in The Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. Poe himself wasn’t buried alive. A common misconception, of the sort that was spread about the cadaverous-appearing Southerner by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, rival writer and self-appointed literary executor, who fervently maligned Poe in his obituary.

“Edgar Allan Poe is dead” wrote Griswold in an 1849 edition of the New-York Daily Tribune, “but few will be grieved by it.” The author of “The Raven” and “The Bells,” of “The Masque of Red Death” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” portrayed as an incurable dipsomaniac married to a child who also happened to be his cousin, a fevered laudanum addict, an itinerate madman wandering the streets of Baltimore.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/to-haunt-and-be-haunted-on-the-exhumation-of-edgar-allen-poe

[Link] Truth, Power, Art: A Critical Manifesto on Creative Nonfiction

Lauren Markham and Chris Feliciano Arnold on the Urgency Writing Truth to Power

by Lauren Markham and Chris Feliciano Arnold

Back in 2017, White House Press Secretary Kellyann Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” to describe realities that were inconvenient to the first Trump Administration. Eight years later, as the second Trump Administration reconfigures the federal government around the facts, opinions and impulses of its choosing, the US public is becoming desensitized to life in a country where reliable information is harder to find—and where the few remaining independent news outlets are routinely attacked for faithfully recording the realities of our fast mutating world.

At a time when reporting the facts is becoming a lost art, how can artists—no matter what they’re making—respond to history in the making?

This is work that used to happen in newspapers. But since the early 20th century, the roughly 24,000 newspapers regularly published in the US has been reduced to 6,000. The US has lost some 2,900 newspapers since 2005 alone, 130 of them in 2023. And with that dramatic reduction in news coverage, thousands of reporters and editors—writers trained in how to seek, evaluate and communicate facts in the form of stories and images—have lost their livelihoods. Worse yet, much of that storytelling and image making has been outsourced to machines and algorithms.

Not only are news sources dwindling, but, in spite of the right-wing obsession with the so-called “leftist media,” an increasing number of outlets are owned by the right. The brazenly conservative Sinclair Media controls 294 broadcast stations nation-wide. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, where he attempts to manipulate his editorial staff to cater to his business interests—and has recently shown a willingness to even to pull advertising critical of the administration and its billionaire allies. Speaking of billionaires, Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the once venerable Los Angeles Times. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, both of these newspapers declined to run an endorsement for President in the 2024 election.)

A recent Pew poll shows that 20 percent of US Americans rely on Meta for their news, and another poll showed 59 percent regularly using X for news. The billionaire owners of those corporations have made their subservience to the Trump Administration clear as day.

Even as readers are drowning in information, our ability to reliably source facts, and to make meaning from those facts, is more imperiled than at any point in US history. As journalists, we are devastated to behold the wreckage of our field. As writers and artists, we wonder how literature can help fill the void.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/truth-power-art-a-critical-manifesto-on-creative-nonfiction

[Link] Let Them Be Morally Flawed: In Defense of Queer Villains in Stories

John Copenhaver on Conflating Queerness with Evil

by John Copenhaver

Queerness and villainy have a long history of being conflated by mainstream entertainment, from Peter Lorre’s effeminate and threatening Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon to the obsessed and manipulative Mrs. Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to, more humorously, the violent Lord Humungus from Mad Max, decked out in leather fetish gear, to the many queer-coded Disney villains, such as the Evil (Drag) Queen in Snow White to the preening Jafar in Aladdin.

Originally, these queer-coded antagonists were molded to contrast mainstream heteronormativity; the straight cis-gendered heroes of these stories embody traditional ideas about gender and sexuality. On the surface, the villains aren’t explicitly queer, but they wear a cloak of queerness to imply a harmful false equivalency that being LGBTQ+ is morally dubious or, from another angle, that transgressing gender and sexuality norms indicates innate corruption or, perhaps, a moral weakness leading to greater evil.

If you grew up in the eighties and early nineties, as I did, it was difficult to find any positive queer role models in popular entertainment or books; few of these stories were within easy reach. So hungry were we for queer characters, we zeroed in on the flamboyant queer-coded villains, which despite the intention behind these characters, we embraced long before Disney seized the opportunity to capitalize on their beloved baddies and began franchising their origin stories. In doing so, they filed down their villains’ horns for mass consumption.

At first glance, transforming queer-coded villains into protagonists with rich backstories seems well-intentioned and progressive. This revision of villainy seems to challenge conflating queerness with corruption: “Those vicious villains weren’t evil after all, just misunderstood.”

In truth, Disney is just nudging these queer-coded characters into the circle of conventional morality, not widening the circle. The original vampy evil fairy Maleficent becomes a scorned and brutalized lover and later a protective mother figure. Vicious and glamorous fashionista Cruella becomes a Dickensian goth orphan girl-cum-fashion designer. While these films are entertaining, they don’t embody progress as much as they want us to believe they do.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/let-them-be-morally-flawed-in-defense-of-queer-villains-in-stories/

[Link] How One Group of Global South Writers is Decolonizing Literature

by Pritika Pradhan

During the pandemic lockdown, writer and editor Bhakti Shringarpure, like many people, found herself seeking to rebuild connections online. At the time, she was living in Nairobi, Kenya, as a Fulbright scholar, and Covid-19 struck at the exact moment when her monthly literary salons had begun to pick up. Continuing the work of organizing book talks and literary gatherings, as she had for a decade as the editor of WARSCAPES magazine, now seemed impossible. However, by attending a weekly Zoom film club with friends, Shringarpure realized it was possible to have lively intellectual conversations online, across different time zones.

Isolation soon gave way to a new sense of community. “Mainstream publishing swallows independent and small presses, and with bookstores and similar spaces shut during the pandemic, it felt like an urgent moment for building community around books that may never see the light of day,” Shringarpure said in an email. Together with longtime friend and collaborator, Suchitra Vijayan, founder of The Polis Project and author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of India, Shringarpure established the Radical Books Collective, an online community dedicated to organizing book clubs on politically progressive books.

Today, a year later, Radical Books Collective is a fast-growing initiative with an international audience of general readers, academics, intellectuals, and book lovers. As its name suggests, “radical” books are the primary focus: fiction and nonfiction by authors and presses whose progressive, left-leaning politics and engagement with difficult topics such as police abolition, climate justice, feminism, and migration, are often hard to market to mainstream publishers and media outlets.

The format of the book club meetings is unique and suitably egalitarian: an hour-long discussion on the book is followed by a meeting with the author, whom readers can engage in conversation. Writers featured on RBC include Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, Amitav Ghosh, Monique Truong, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi. An upcoming series titled Reading African Women will feature LA Times Book Prize winner Véronique Tadjo, Nigerian-American novelist Chinelo Okparanta, and Kenyan poet and novelist Khadija Abdalla Bajaber.

“Organizations like the Radical Book Collective offer an alternative literary space for like-minded authors and readers to find each other and to share ways of thinking differently.”

“Our format succeeds because it is amazing to bring books and writers together in events and podcasts, to think about these collectively as radical in different ways, support small publishers, highlight translation and ignored corners of exciting creative production, and have smart people chat with writers,” Meg Arenberg, RBC’s managing editor, said, “This is the way one shifts the conversation.”

The impetus to shift the conversation in publishing towards greater diversity has long preceded the pandemic. Despite commercial presses publishing more writers of color, LGBTQ writers, and writers from other historically marginalized communities, the inclusion of diverse literary voices in mainstream publishing remains a work in progress. The Black Lives Matter protests resulted in increased scrutiny of the publishing industry, which highlighted the persistent, systemic imbalances and prejudices faced by writers and publishing professionals from racial, sexual, and other minorities, such as the racial disparities in pay revealed via the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/how-one-group-of-global-south-writers-is-decolonizing-literature

[Link] 50 Pulp Cover Treatments of Classic Works of Literature

Guns, Broads, Beefcake, Literariness

by Emily Temple

Last month at CrimeReads, Rebecca Romney looked at a few classic detective novels that had, at one time or another, gotten makeovers as sexy pulps—because as we all know, the easiest way to sell something is to make it look salacious (whether it actually is or not). But it isn’t only great detective novels that have gotten the pulp treatment. Classic works of literary fiction have existed as pulps from the very beginning of pulp—the new paperback publishers of the 1940s and 50s printed them right along with classic crime and some genuinely lowbrow (and sometimes quite lurid) new novels, often commissioning the very same artists to design their covers. Below, I dug up a few of these pulpified classics (not including the Pulp! The Classics imprint)—many of which I found through the excellent resource Pulp Covers. Some are true pulp covers—with overtly sexy women and tantalizing movie-esque taglines—while others are just amusingly lowbrow mass market treatments of highbrow novels. Either way, they’re even better than you’d expect.

Read the full article and see the pretty pictures: https://lithub.com/50-pulp-cover-treatments-of-classic-works-of-literature

[Link] Darkest New England: What is the Northern Gothic Literary Tradition?

by W.S. Winslow

Darkness. Madness. Specters. Death. Add some menacing weather, a tortured anti-hero and a long-buried secret or two and you’ve got the makings of a fine old Gothic novel in the tradition of Jane Eyre or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, big, chewy tales that roll right up to the precipice of horror but stop just short, lingering instead in the realm of Europe’s Dark Romanticism. Cross the line into horror and you leave the gloom of Manderley and Wuthering Heights for the hallucinogenic terror of The Castle of Otranto, Dracula’s Transylvania or Doctor Jekyll’s lab.

American fiction has its own Gothic tradition. Best known is the southern version, set not in cathedrals, castles and moors, but amidst the decrepit plantations and enduring ruin of the Civil War. Whereas the Southern Gothic is draped in Spanish moss, surrounded by cotton fields and oppressed by summer swelter, the Northern Gothic was born of cold and Calvinism, isolation and endurance, rooted not in the horrors of slavery and a fetishized myth of southern gentility, but the sharp, hard edge of fundamentalist Protestantism and the hopelessness of predestination. It’s the Salem of Goodman Brown, Poe’s House of Usher, and Ambrose Bierce’s Owl Creek Bridge.

Despite the general decline of organized religion in recent years, cultural Puritanism persists in much of New England and is foundational to its history. Ever since the European invasion of the New World, the roots of that belief system have been snaking underfoot, pushing so deep into the ground that they nearly choked out other traditions: those of the First People, later arrivals from Catholic Europe and French-speaking Canada, and the Black and Brown descendants of the Great Migration. If you like your literature fraught with doom, New England is a good place to find it.

I ought to know. My own family is descended from the earliest settlers in the New World and has been living in Maine since the beginning of the 18th century. Most of our people were Puritans, but there were also some French Canadians and Quakers, the latter contributing a marked strain of intransigence to a bloodline already amply endowed with it. Starting in Salem Town the historical record of my family includes a litany of contrarian behavior that resulted in fines, periodic imprisonment and occasional flogging, which is why, I suppose, a couple of generations after they disembarked in Massachusetts, my forebearers started moving steadily north to un- or sparsely inhabited places in what later became Maine. And here we have stayed for ten generations.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/darkest-new-england-what-is-the-northern-gothic-literary-tradition/

[Link] The Pleasures of Tsundoku, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Book Pile

by Antoine Wilson

Recently, while moving several piles of books (31 titles) from the floor to another place on the floor to make space for my office chair, I experienced a moment of clarity during which I felt like I had arrived at the end of a manic episode and was confronting the aftermath.

Hoarders have been known to describe how seemingly insignificant detritus—an old cup, a yellowed newspaper, a toothbrush—are so meaningful to them that they couldn’t possibly be thrown away.

I, too, was capable of justifying the presence of each of my individual piled up volumes. There was Thomas Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence. Purchased on the recommendation of a friend, begun at some point, set aside not because not good but because quietly usurped, knowing that someday I would get back to young Thomas on his bicycle. The usurper? Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear. I wanted to soak in Marías for a little while, but apparently not long enough to finish. Next, Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, awaiting comparison to the only other one I’d read, Tobias Smollett’s. And adjacent in stack and century, Tristram Shandy, half-finished, waiting for the right mood to strike. Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, uncracked—a purchase inspired by Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book. Bergman’s The Magic Lantern, just begun, which I picked up because Dorthe Nors mentioned it somewhere, and, below that, her story collection Wild Swims…

Other stacks contained more yet-to-be read novels by authors I loved, books bought for research, various computer programming guides, more than one how-to book on writing, an excess of belles lettres, journals, books by friends, and, perhaps the most pathological and well-represented category, various iterations of the book I had to buy to magically solve the problems in whatever project I was currently working on.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/the-pleasures-of-tsundoku-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-book-piles

[Link] The Agony and the Ecstasy of Taking Author Photos

By Tom Rachman

I walked into the bookstore gripping my debut novel, its cover puckering where my sweaty fingers clutched tight, as if to remind myself: You’ve published a book, you’re not an absolute imposter. What awaited was a lectern and a huddle of sad chairs. This was back in 2010, at one of my first readings. Here I was, a writer at last. Only, how to appear writerly?

“Oh, hey!” the event organizer said, noticing me hesitating in the doorway. “I actually recognize you from your author photo.”

“You sound a bit surprised—do authors not look like their photos?”

Not usually, she answered. The writer on the book jacket and the writer in store often differ by more than a decade. We chortled about vain authors. Didn’t they realize they’d be unmasked at every public event?

Flash forward to my third novel. The publishers need a publicity photo of me for the inside cover. I’m glancing at an old headshot, then at the 43-year-old in the mirror: grayer, pudgier, baggier. Is it a crime, I wonder, to stay 33 for another book?

Problem is, books are written slowly, and aging happens all of a sudden. So the author is secreted away during the composition of a new novel, typing and deleting, until finally it’s complete and ready for exposure, at which point the writer stumbles from a study into the (very minor) flurry of publicity. By then, the previous shot compared with the new one is like a Before-and-After for a spa you’d best avoid.

Stressing about an author photo isn’t just vanity. It’s also about career survival, given that the spoils of fiction are meager, and accrue to the few. Writing novels is often a business of lionized old lions and bright young debutants, with prairies of middle-aged mid-listers between. An author’s image—not beautiful necessarily, but of striking looks—helps the sales package. Consider Virginia Woolf or George Orwell, Zadie Smith or Karl Ove Knausgaard. When I think of them, I have plenty of opinions about their work. But what I picture is their author photos: flinty or debonair or aloof. Culture—no matter how we hate to admit it—is a style choice too. This is disenchanting for all the obvious reasons, not least because many writers chose this line of work partly because relying on looks seemed a dismal answer to the world’s indifference.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-taking-author-photos/

[Link] GOOD WRITERS BORROW, GREAT WRITERS REMIX: WHY IT’S OK TO REUSE, REPURPOSE, AND RECYCLE FICTION

by Lincoln Michel

This morning I took my cup of coffee and laptop to a desk to work on an old short story I’ve been kicking around when I made the greatest mistake any writer can make: I opened Facebook.

Between posts on the current horrors of the Trump administration, my timeline was filled with discussions about Sadia Shepard’s debut short story “Foreign-Returned” in this week’s New Yorker, which the author Francine Prose had been attacking in a series of Facebook posts. Prose was offended by the fact that Shepard’s story used plot elements and even language from a story by the late Mavis Gallant: “the only major difference being that the main characters here are Pakistanis in Connecticut during the Trump era instead of Canadians in post-WW II Geneva,” Prose said, calling the story a “travesty.” Other authors pushed back, with Marlon James, for example, noting that he didn’t notice this “self-righteous venom being dished out […] when Jonathan Safran Foer took as much as he wanted from Jessica Soffer’s “Beginning, End.”

The short story I had opened, and then abandoned as I fell into the social media hole, is titled “A Feeling Artist.” It is an homage to Kafka that takes the plot of “A Hunger Artist,” but sets it in a version of the contemporary world where a “feeling artist” finds his popularity eclipsed by young cellphone app and YouTube artists who do rapid-fire feeling acts instead of his carefully crafted long-form sadness performances. I don’t know if this story will work or not, but I know that taking an element or two (or even three or four) from a work I love and reconfiguring them into something new is one of my most generative practices. So I immediately got sucked into the debate.

In the comments of Prose’s posts, other authors said they were contacting the New Yorker to complain and many suggested they’d never read something that was inspired by another piece or used similar structures or plots because they wanted to read “original” pieces with “imagination.” No matter how one feels about Shepard’s story, the ahistoricity of these comments, though predictable, was still surprising. We know, for example, that William Shakespeare’s plays frequently borrowed plots, characters, and even names from other plays. And we know that countless great works of art have been created by adapting Shakespeare’s plots to different settings (Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood) or reworking his characters in a new way (Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). And yet time and again I see authors act like homage, pastiche, and remixing is some kind of lesser form of creation. That it doesn’t count.

An art form is a conversation between artists. Literature is massive ballroom stretching through time in which authors debate, rebut, woo, and chat with each other. (A genre is perhaps a dialogue in one corner of the party.) They steal ideas to make them better. Or to make them different. Or to expose the problems in them. We know all this, and influences are regularly discussed in English lit classes. And yet, in the world of contemporary creative writing, people get upset when that dialogue is something we overhear.

Read the full article: http://lithub.com/good-writers-borrow-great-writers-remix/

[Link] THE TIME I WROTE A 150,000-WORD PULP NOVEL IN A MONTH TO WIN A BET

by Stanley Donwood

Thirteen years ago I wrote a novel as the result of a bet between myself and my publisher at the time. The result was Catacombs of Terror! I’m going to try to remember how this happened, although due to the passage of time and the vagaries of memory, much of what follows will be unreliable.

One afternoon in the pub, over several pints of cider, the eccentric publisher Ambrose Blimfield proposed that I write a novel. He promised he would publish it. But, he continued, lighting a cigar, I had to write it in a month. In fact, he said, to “encourage” me, he’d bet me five quid that I couldn’t do it.

“Don’t most publishers give writers an advance?” I asked.

“I’m not most publishers. Here’s the deal. I bet you five pounds that you can’t write a 150,000-word novel in one month. If you do it, you get the five quid and I publish the book. If you don’t, I get a fiver off you, and I have to go back to publishing local poets. I hate local poets. In fact, I hate all poets. And all poetry. I have a long-standing and deeply entrenched hostility to the form. Anyway. How about it? I’ll give you half the profits.”

At the time my finances were distinctly precarious.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

Read the full article: http://lithub.com/the-time-i-wrote-a-150000-word-pulp-novel-in-a-month-to-win-a-bet/