BURN PILE: Author Interviews Wonderland Edition

When the words come hard and you need a minute of procrastinatory inspiration, interviews with authors you love (or don’t know you love, yet) are a route of re-entry to your own work. Reading or watching or listening about writing feels like something constructive while you’re behaving less like a creator, and more like a nonproductive lump, staring slack-eyed at the computer. And for avid readers, interviews offer a look into an author’s head, a “Behind the Music” for wordmongers. The humans creating your favorite books are (you hope!) as fascinating as the books themselves, and the interviews, like literary works, are timeless.

The Paris Review is my top-of-the-heap inspiration source, for their series of author interviews dating back to the ‘50s. (The price of a subscription allows access to the periodical’s entire online archive. Seriously. Everything.)

Sheila Heti discusses her first book, "The Middle Stories." Part of "The Paris Review"'s "My First Time" video interview series. Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/1c7dpzW Watch more videos at: http://www.theparisreview.org/myfirst... ----------------------------------------­----------------------- Twitter: https://twitter.com/parisreview Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/parisreview Google+: https://plus.google.com/1053743443162... This series is made by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling.

There's a video series, too, on authors’ “My First Time.” Sheila Heti speaks here about her first story collection, The Middle Stories.  Subscribe for free to the video series.

Here’s the playlist so far:
My First Time Video Series.

Through a stroke of required-reading luck, I’ve been enjoying the work of Cate Kennedy this week. Along with her stories, the Net is graced with Cate’s interviews, both text-based and on video. Indulge yourself:

“Unbraiding the Short Story with Cate Kennedy,” at World Literature Today: “If I had to sum up in one word what ‘the human condition’ is, I’d say that word is ‘ouch.’ … Human fallibility seems to be a preoccupation I return to over and over again. What people do when they’re behind the eight ball or floundering with a hit that’s come out of left field. Not so much what they think or say: what they actually do.”

the world beneath cate kennedy.jpg

In a Griffith Review piece, Cate reveals: “…one of the powerful things about writing from ordinary life is the elements you select from it are immediately recognisable to people. So you can hide things in plain sight, in a way, or subvert expectation.” (Here’s the story referenced in the interview, “A Glimpse of Paradise.”)

Last in this Cate Kennedy-obsessed list (there are many more online), an in-depth live video interview: “At this Sydney Writer’ Festival session, award-winning writer Cate Kennedy speaks to publisher Hilary McPhee about her highly regarded debut novel, The World Beneath.” Go watch it here.

Google any author, and you’ll find a wide-ranging selection of windows into nuns or other inhabitants of their head. And as long as I’m in this video rabbit hole, join me. Here’s the entrance to burrow into another favorite brain: search for George Saunders interview on Youtube…

Look! It's George Saunders and Stephen Colbert, “George Saunders has a Nun in His Head.”

George Saunders tells Stephen about his writing process, the nun in his head and sings a song about winning (sort of).

Dig into the craft-mind of Missoula author, Melissa Stephenson, in Michael Noll’s interview series “Read to Write Stories.” Michael’s blog (with a book coming soon) “features weekly writing exercises based on a story, novel excerpt, or essay that has been published or made available online.” The list of authors Noll interviews is a mile-long scroll of goodness. Have a look here.

Prefer to simply listen? Start with Sarah Vap and Rachel Zucker, at Zucker’s Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People).

Not to be left out, CutBank interview excitement is on the horizon, too!
We’ve got our own interview feature coming early next week, as Jason Bacaj brings us a conversation with William Finnegan. Finnegan is a UM alumnus, New Yorker staff writer, and winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. And of course, you can find videos to get you warmed up for Jason’s interview. If you're in Missoula, Finnegan will be giving at craft lecture October 13. See the Facebook event listing for details.

Okay, one more from Cate Kennedy, at WritingtheWild.net: On the act of writing the early drafts, getting the first rush on paper vs ‘crafting’ later on: “Getting into a ‘generative’ state of mind, though, is harder – it’s a brainwave state, pretty much, rather than a learned expertise – like daydreaming. The less analysis and second-guessing involved in this state, the better.”

Director/editor - Ed Dougherty DP - Jeff Schneider Animation - Luis Romo Colorist - Persephanie Engel

To wrap this Burn Pile up tight, enjoy A Giant Dog falling into another kind of rabbit hole… Here’s “Roller Coaster,” from their fourth album, Toy. Something of a visual interview with a twist: AGD’s Sabrina Ellis and Andrew Cashen adventure through a day in Disneyland, while, ahem, in a mindspace reminiscent of (Go Ask) Alice … in Wonderland? Read the article here, or click play on the wide-eyed video trip.

Thanks for the reminder, Karma.

Thanks for the reminder, Karma.

BURN PILE:  ~ Arting about art ~

Writing about writing, painting about words, seeing things others don’t hear, and more songs about buildings and food.

One of our great privileges here at CutBank is to publish the All Accounts and Mixture feature. The works are as varied as their authors. Poems. Stories. Essays. Indefinables. All of them stunning and strong.

The blend of music and memory in “Conversations with Paul,” by David Meischen, inspired a leap into a note-taking, brainstorming rabbit hole which swallowed me in tangents, twisted connections, trainwrecks of thought, and unrelated wonderings over what’s so enchanting about art that includes other art, or is about art, or is experimental in overlapping genres and mediums. What qualifies as “experimental,” anyway? “Conversations” isn’t a piece directly about music, yet Meischen weaves the Beatles throughout the narrative, and this twining of mediums led to another All Accounts contributor, Crystal Hartman and her piece, “Visual Response to Federico García Lorca,” featured on the blog back in July of 2014.

Here’s Sir Paul, covering his old band’s stuff: Paul McCartney - Abbey Road Medley (Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End) - Live In Tokyo 2013

Another side tunnel in the rabbit hole leads to written art about the visual, including a visit with poet Lisa Beech Hartz in the Mud Season Review and Rust + Moth, a dip into ancient Listlandia for Ten of the best: examples of ekphrasis, followed inexplicably (like most synaptic paths of association) by a brief foray into synesthesia, and the paintings it inspired in Melissa McCracken, and finally down to the sidewalk with one more poem about painting at the Street Lit blog: “You Paint Loud.”

Today (Sept 29/17) at a Montana Book Festival panel on the inner workings of lit journals — a panel moderated masterfully by CutBank’s own Editor-in-Chief, the wisely-nodding Bryn Agnew — experimental work got a mention, and the role of online journals in providing space for that experimentation (when it works!). Sundog Lit in particular meets that need. (They announced their Best of the Net nominees today.) Also discussed was the Oxford American’s successful melding of music and literature, which, in a flash of unfocused clicking, led to Björk, as experimental as ever in the Guardian’s Track of the Week: The Gate, “perhaps the Björkiest thing that’s ever Björked.”

And in the end? More Songs About Buildings and Food.

is this art.jpg

The answer is “Yes.”

BURN PILE: Burnt Books

"Jorge Luis Borges noted that ‘of all man’s instruments the most wondrous is, without any doubt, the book ... it is the extension of memory and imagination’. The key word here is ‘memory’. Books form the collective memory that any conqueror, dictator or fanatic seeks to destroy."
Kenneth Baker, "Burning Books"

As if meant to counterbalance the forces of the universe, the Montana Book Festival (Sept 27-Oct 1) shares the calendar with Banned Books Week. You owe it to humanity to join us in Missoula to celebrate all things lit (and pie and whiskey, and such).

banning books buring books.jpg

There will be no burnings (and no bannings) of books or other goodness, although you might just get a little lit yourself. The full festival schedule is right here, and while you're running around Missoula, be a good citizen and visit the festival's sponsors.

The Burning of Books or St Dominic de Guzman and the Albigensians, By Pedro Berruguete, 15th century

The Burning of Books or St Dominic de Guzman and the Albigensians, By Pedro Berruguete, 15th century

The American Library Association takes on the hefty mission of providing "leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.” (Emphasis is emphatically ours...) Part of their chores involve dealing with challenges lain on the table by folks who wish the world conformed more tightly to their own views. Here's the top 10 from last year. You might detect a theme running through these challenges... Hmm...

At BannedBooksWeek.org, you can dig into 10 Deliciously Dangerous Poetry Books, an examination of Banned Books that Shaped America (I'm thrilled that Where the Wild Things Are made this list!), and although the map is a tad outdated, Mapping Censorship is an interesting view of what and where in the efforts to shut down access to "questionable" literature. Missoula apparently had issues with Jon Jackson's Dead Folks and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. 

Signature-Reads.com gives Tom Blunt, offering up 16 Quotes from Great Authors for Banned Books Week. Among these is the closer for this week's Burnpile, from Henry Louis Gates Jr., “2 Live Crew, Decoded,” 1990:

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”

The comments are wide open. If you've got thoughts, let's see 'em.

Be kind, be generous with your art and your heart, and Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum.

BURN PILE: The season is upon us —

…for submissions!

Submissions for the CutBank print edition are now open. Our print journal is accepting submissions of fiction or creative nonfiction up to 8,500 words, and poetry up to 5 poems per submission. Electronic only, please. There is no fee, and full guidelines are right here: http://www.cutbankonline.org/print-edition/

The CutBank Big Sky, Small Prose: Flash Contest is still open, but shuts down entries tomorrow, September 16. There’s a $500 first place prize, with publication in CutBank 88. Two runners-up will be awarded $50 and publication in CutBank 88.  All other submissions will be considered with submissions for the CutBank print edition. Send us 750 words or fewer. Lyric essays, prose poems, short essays, vignettes - send us your best, most dazzling short form prose. Hurry!  Entry fee is only $7.00. Submit here: https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit

David Byron Queen, in the fiction track at UM’s MFA program, has a fabulously unsettling flash piece up in the latest issue of (b)OINK: "Bonesetters." And Renée Branum (UM MFA 2017), is the Nonfiction Winner of Aquifer, the Florida Review Online’s 2017 Editor’s Award, with her essay, “Bolt.”  

The Cassini spacecraft made the ultimate sacrifice, and is now mind-and-body melded with Saturn. Its life ended in a fiery, “do no harm” way, to ensure our horrible terrestrial microbes wouldn’t rub off should Cassini bump into Titan or Enceladus, two of Saturn’s SIXTY-TWO moons. Coverage here, at WAPO.

Elsewhere in the sky, we’ve had atmospheric issues nationwide (that’s an understatement), yet some beauty may still come of it. The Northwest may be seeing its season of flames and haze end soon, and yet, words remain, some of them gorgeous in their ominous tone. Or just plain gorgeous. The Seattle Times turned to artists and writers to turn smoke into art.

In the random notes file, we’ve got wonders from all around:

Until next time, here’s Elvis Costello, and his pitch to “write every day” … sort of. 
:-)

BURN PILE: Once upon a time, a (hu)man walks into a bar…

…or hunkers down by the campfire with a story of the big one that got away, or gives in when the kids demand before bed: “Tell us again about that time when…”

How would we know who we are, if not for our stories? When we share them, we reveal the book inside the cover, the person inside the persona we either design for the judging eyes of others, or an identity imposed upon us by circumstance. “Listen,” we say. “Let me tell you who I really am.” Detroit, whose cover blurbs might point to tales of “abandoned auto factories and urban desolation,” has taken steps to present a fresh narrative. Edward Helmore writes in The Guardian of how, “irritated by the relentless focus on ruin porn, or pre-emptive stories about the city’s tech resurgence, Aaron Foley will attempt to offer a more nuanced portrait” of the city and its people, in “Detroit redefined: city hires America's first official 'chief storyteller'”  

Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, tells us stories about stories and the science behind them in a fascinating (and entertaining) Ted talk. “Every day in our lives we are trying to impose the order of story structure on the chaos of existence.” Telling stories to ourselves, and constructing narratives to inhabit is a survival skill, a winnowing of information overload. But other questions bubble up: Why do “we care so much, especially about fiction? About the fake struggles of fake people. Why is that interesting to us?” Have a look: https://youtu.be/Vhd0XdedLpY

The “chaos of existence” leaves most of us little time for stories, other than trying to predict the path of our days, or to look back and try to shoehorn those days into our chosen narratives. There’s always time for flash, though! The New Yorker discovered flash fiction recently. “Smithereens,” by Aleksandar Hemon, 741 words that revel in the “endless joy of converting something into nothing.”  Visit the entire collection: Flash Fiction: A summer of very short stories, for 10 of the New Yorker's favorites.

(b)OINK presents its 2017 flash contest winners, pieces small and brilliant and distilled.    
The winners were chosen by Kathy Fish, who you can get to know better in an interview at The Other Stories, in which she discusses the evolution of “Sway.”

CutBank’s Big Sky, Small Prose flash contest is open for submissions, but not for long! Entries are welcome until September 16. This year's contest will be judged by Zach VandeZande, an Assistant Professor at Central Washington University, who will choose examples of the most “interesting, compelling fiction and nonfiction prose in 750 words or fewer.” Pare and polish and submit your finest. There’s a $500 first place prize, with publication in CutBank 88, and two runners-up will be awarded $50 each along with publication. All submissions will be considered for the print edition of CutBank Literary Magazine. Guidelines are here, or head straight to Submittable to enter your work!

Take Note! Cutbank’s general submission season opens soon, September 15 - February 1, and we’re always open for your contributions to the blog! Submission guidelines at CutBank Online.
 

BURN PILE: Hey! Who are you, anyway?  Art, heart, and smoldering questions about reality and writers.

Who are you when you write? Where does the line blur between the identity of an author conjuring wordworlds, and the persona of their voice as written? How does the reader perceive the two (or more?) voices, and how do they relate to them?

    In the spirit of identity crisis, let's celebrate the late Eleanor Hibbert’s birthday. Primarily a novelist, Hibbert’s 1993 obit in the New York Times provides a long list of pseudonyms: Eleanor Burford, Elbur Ford, Ellalice Tate, Victoria Holt, and Jean Plaidy. “She never revealed her maiden name or age,” the piece reads. “Two of her publishers listed conflicting birth years, 1906 and 1910. For years the true identity of the writer behind the three [most successful] pseudonyms was a tightly guarded secret in the publishing world.”
     More recently, we have “Dear Sugar,” the eclectic advice column at The Rumpus — the columnist’s identity revealed as Cheryl Strayed only after Wild took off. (You can find Sugar/Strayed's fabulous and famous WLaMF column here. Mind you, it’s NSFW, but all the more powerful for it.)
     JT LeRoy and the enigma of hoax versus pseudonym has pestered truth seekers since the ‘90s. Read backstory on the nonexistent JT at The Guardian, then meet the author behind the mystery in the documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story. While you’re bingeing instead of writing, indulge in the moral horror of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, the film made while the world believed JT was real. (Both are streaming on a device near you.)
     Meanwhile, the saga continues: Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern are at work on a film about Savanna Knoop, the woman who played (in real life) the writer who didn’t exist: “A Behind-the-Scenes First Look at Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern in JT Leroy.”

Truth, Love, and Answers may seem in short supply these days, but art — no: ART — can lead us to Heart in an unjust world. Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings gives us a look at the words of LeRoi Jones, writing as Amiri Baraka, in a “lyrical manifesto for largehearted living.” Jones reminds us “We have / each other, and the / World…” Art speaking truth to power, right? (Yes, please and thank you.) Read the articles linked within, and at the end of the page, too. 

Last note for the day: A Burn Pile thumb goes up for Lit Hub’s feature piece, “Where Are the Likes? Coming to Terms with Being a Writer on Social Media,” in which Nick Ripatrazone wonders whether our friends clicking love buttons for our successes means anything when it comes to connecting to our work… “Congratulations on publishing a poem is a second’s worth of action; reading and understanding that poem is a real commitment.”

A big CutBank thanks to all of you. Don’t forget to be kind. Don’t forget how much the world needs you. Be generous with your art, your heart, and your energy!

PS: Coming soon: Our regular feature, All Accounts and Mixture, will be presenting new works for you in the next weeks. Keep an eye out for it! 

BURN PILE: New Lit TV, Great Young American Novelists, Good Friends, and Something Funny from McSweeney’s

In this week’s Burn Pile, CutBank brings you all your essential literary entertainment needs (at least for another week-or-so). Binge-worthy TV shows, work from great young American novelists, a heartwarming story of friendship and cannons, and something funny from McSweeney’s:

·       Two new literary TV shows debuted recently: Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and STARZ’s American Gods. Read related articles from The New Yorker here and BookRiot here.

·       The excellent folks at Granta have also released a special issue featuring the best of young American novelists. Get the issue featuring Emma Cline, Catherine Lacey, Jesse Ball, Lauren Groff, Karan Mahajan, and Claire Vaye Watkins here. In addition, read LitHub’s feature of “10 More of the Best Young American Novelists” here.

·       Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is also coming to the Apollo stage. Read The New York Times write-up here.

·       In other news, Johnny Depp spent five million dollars on a cannon to blast Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes—what a good friend.

·       And finally meet Thad—your worst student—courtesy of McSweeney’s.
 

Stay strong, friends. CutBank out.

BURN PILE: Advice for Book Lovers, Rebecca Solnit, and Congestion of the Brain

We ordinarily come up with some sort of theme for the Burn Pile—a feature in which we offer up a smattering of the week’s lit-related offerings—but our picks for this week are perhaps best described as “grab bag.” Consider the following, no less tasty for their randomness:

  • Have you seen the New York Times’ “Match Book”? It is—wait for it—“an advice column for book lovers.” People write in asking for recommendations based on previous likes/dislikes/obsessions, and writer-cum–book critic Nicole Lamy responds via columns with titles like “Busy Dad Seeks New Updike” or “Books for Globetrotting Girls” (both published this week). Is it just me, or is this both heartwarming and profoundly comforting?    
         
  • The New Yorker’s “Page Turner” reviews Rebecca Solnit’s new book of feminist essays, The Mother of All Questions. The genesis of the collection was Solnit’s infuriating encounter with a male interviewer in which he insisted she explain her decision to not have children. The encounter is, as Page Turner notes, “a self-conscious corollary” to the incident from Solnit’s earlier feminist work, “Men Explain Things to Me”—an essay that gave rise to the term “mansplaining.”
     
  • John Scalzi, a Los Angeles Times critic and Hugo award-winning novelist, offers readers a ten-point plan for getting creative work done during a Trump presidency.  Necessary and dare we say inspirational.
     
  • And because more than half our staff is gleefully morbid (oh how they delighted in explaining corpse farms to me at our recent content meeting), I’ll leave you with Lit Hub’s piece on “The Notorious Legends and Dubious Stories of Ten Literary Deaths.” Click-baity? Sure. But you know you want to hear the attending doctor’s thoughts on Edgar Allen Poe’s suspected “congestion of the brain.” Drank himself to death? Maybe… maybe not. We won’t even get into that turtle that supposedly struck Aeschylus in the head.

BURN PILE: In Memoriam

It’s been a hard few weeks for art, literature, and music. We’ve lost notable people whose art has forever enriched humanity. This week, CutBank remembers those people.

At The Paris Review, check out this story about Chuck Berry and mysticism.

Derek Walcott tells us the problem with poetry students in The New Yorker.

Electric Literature remembers Colin Dexter, the author of the Inspector Morse series.

Chet Cunningham—prolific author of 450 books—is remembered by Los Angeles Times.

And at LitHub a number of literary icons including Joan Didion, Claire Messud, and John Banville recount the legendary brilliance of Robert Silvers, founding editor of The New York Review of Books.

CutBank thanks these people for their brilliant lives and work.

Never forgotten:

Chuck Berry (1953–2017)

Derek Walcott (1930–2017)

Colin Dexter (1930–2017)

Chet Cunningham (1928–2017)

Robert Silvers (1929–2017)

BURN PILE: Lent, NOLA, and... Butter?

Lent is upon us, folks. Yes, it is the season of ascetic self-denial. But fear not! CutBank is here to provide you a literary/culinary survival guide for your time of penance. Prepare yourself for the dog-days to come, the days of gazing slack-jawed at the new season of Chef’s Table, dreaming of the grand Easter meal to come.

But what of Fat Tuesday? Even though the last day of revelry has come and gone, we can still look back at Literary Hub’s list of ten great works of New Orleans literature to help you remember the festivities you probably don’t remember.

And the Pope, we can’t forget about the Pope! The Paris Review features the story of Bartolomeo Scappi—the head chef for Renaissance popes and cardinals.

Or maybe you’re the practical kind—stoic and studious. The Millions offers you a literary reader for Lent—forty reads for forty days.

Have you ever wondered about the eating habits of your favorite writers? If so, check out Entropy’s feature aptly named Dinnerview. The feature explores the culinary lives of many writers such as Bonnie Jo Campbell, Julia Elliott, Rebecca Makkai, and Mary Jo Bang.

It is important to remember the simple things during Lent, the small delights that make the world bearable. Butter, for instance. Over at Electric Literature, Ted Wilson reviews butter (5 stars). Need I say more?

CutBank wishes you only the best in your time of atonement.

Fight the good fight.

BURN PILE: Celebrity Writers

Who ever said you had to be a poor, highly-educated, no name to be a writer? Who said you had to struggle through a sea of ramen to one day wield the authorial power of an MFA and/or PhD?

Why not just be a celeb?

Mick Jagger wrote a memoir apparently. But he also forgot he wrote a memoir. That might be the most Mick Jagger thing I’ve ever heard.

But this begs the question: what celebrity books do we really need to have? Fortunately, the good folks at Literary Hub have answered this question.

If we were to follow this line of questioning further down the rabbit hole, who is the best fake novelist on TV? Electric Literature hands out their fake Pulitzer.

All right, all right. Let’s reel this back in. Did you know that the one and only Marcel Proust starred in a movie? Take a gander here.

And for all you celeb and not celeb writers out there, Brain Pickings has compiled a list of famous advice on writing to help you as you slog forward with your next prize-winning manuscript.

As always, keep scribbling.
 

BURN PILE: Dystopia, America

Things I said way too much this week:

1)    He did what?
2)   Have you seen Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men?

Are you ready for the Cheeto-glazed descent into the dystopian future? Did you get your copy of 1984 before Amazon ran out of copies?

The Los Angeles Times reminds us that dystopias are “a great place to be a tourist. Not a great place to be a permanent resident.”

So, what can we do to help?

Hope? Yes, yes, a story of hope! A story of resistance. No, not Rogue One. How about the story of an all-but-forgotten American diplomat who resisted the Armenian Genocides of 1915 and 1916?

Or perhaps you would like a drink? The fine geniuses at McSweeney’s have compiled a list of presidential cocktails for every occasion.

Not thirsty? Maybe a trip to the movies can cure your growing despair.  I Am Not Your Negro hits the big screen today. Go see it. The screenplay was written by the great James Baldwin.

But really, why not just join the resistance? AWP is in D.C. this year, and numerous protests and rallies are being organized to coincide with the arrival of over 12,000 writers, editors, students, teachers, and publishers.

Above all, resist.

Make America Read Again.

BURN PILE: A New Year, a New President, and a Writer's Call to Arms

Today, amid simultaneous outcry and applause from a deeply divided country, Donald Trump was sworn in as the forty-fifth U.S. president. The day after the election, Dan Piepenbring of the Paris Review posted the following under the headline “Writers, Start Writing.” His call to arms bears repeating today:

“This site is dedicated to literature, arts, and culture. Electoral politics are usually beyond our remit. On a morning like this, when America has chosen a bigot and a xenophobe as its next president, my job feels pointless. But I don’t want to add to the chorus of despair, because I do believe there’s a role for art at a time like this, and I don’t say that lightly—words like these don’t come easily to me. I would rather make fun of things, and I’m struggling against an inborn fatalism. (My iPhone just reminded me to water my plants, and I thought, why bother?) The creative impulse is such a fragile thing, but we have to create now. We owe it to ourselves to do the work. I want to encourage you. If you aspire to write, put aside all the niceties and sureties about what art should be and write something that makes the scales fall from our eyes. Forget the tired axioms about showing and telling, about sense of place—any possible obstruction—and write to destroy complacency, to rattle people, to help people, first and foremost yourself. Lodge your ideas like glass shards in the minds of everyone who would have you believe there’s no hope. And read, as often and as violently as you can. If you have friends, as I do, who tacitly believe that it’s too much of a chore to read a book, just one fucking book, from start to finish, smash every LCD they own. This is an opportunity. There’s too much at stake now to pretend that everything is okay.”

Entropy Magazine, beloved by writers for its lists of "Where to Submit" throughout the year, has included a section for "Post Election Calls for Submissions." (Deadlines include Jan. 27 and Feb. 28., with Anti-Heroin Chic taking submissions through midnight tonight "on Trump, the election and the trauma/coping/resistance surrounding this event.")

If the muse fails you, and you instead feel the need to turn to the writing and wisdom of others, (a move Piepenbring also suggests), you might pick up one of (former!) President Obama's recommended books, as shared with New York Times chief book critic Michiko Katukani in a recent interview, itself well worth reading.

If all else fails, try my recipe for an essential oils blend I call "Feel Better":  Frankincense (6 drops) for grounding, Cedar (6 drops) for grieving, Lavender (6 drops) for calming, Ylang Ylang (6 drops) for boosting mood, and Mandarin (2 drops) for energizing.

BURN PILE: Fake It 'Til You Make It

Sometimes, you just have to fake it.

Whether you need to wing that last-minute term paper or just charm a stranger at the office holiday party, Lit Hub humbly offers “An Incomplete Guide to Proper Literary Name-Dropping.” If this nifty article doesn’t do the trick, you can always turn to Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, which extols the virtues of skimming and/or gleaning information from what others say about a text, among other approaches.

Recently, the editors of the New York Times offered up their picks for the ten best books of 2016—perhaps, in a pinch, these shall be your favorites too? Of course, there’s always the chance you won’t have to talk about the books themselves, but can get by on a critique of their covers.

Meanwhile, over at Book Riot, Michelle Anne Schlinger presents her ode to “dirty books” and the good old fashioned reading that makes them so—books that have been read to death, books with broken spines and torn pages, books that take on that beloved “old book smell." Schlinger notes, “To be in such disrepair, for a book, means that you have been enjoyed.”

As the holidays approach, and with them a handful of precious lazy afternoons, I ask myself, Remember reading for pleasure?

BURN PILE: Curing the Election Blues

Well, the election happened, and Donald J. Trump is going to be our next president. That is a sentence I never thought I’d write, and it is a sentence, so many of us fear, in more than one sense of the word.

The L.A. Times argues one way to weather the Trump presidency is to head to your nearest public library. Why? Because it is the one institution most Americans still champion. In the meantime, you can read a collection of post-election-results tweets from famous authors—everyone from Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates (who in turn quotes Samuel Beckett)—compiled by the Times.

Garnette Cadogan, a Jamaican immigrant and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, speaks about the importance of “staying and fighting” despite Trump’s well documented stance on immigration, as well as the importance of “finding strength in poetry.”

But maybe it would be better to just slip into cushy escapism. This week the New York Times listed its top illustrated children’s books of 2016, along with a review of two new nonfiction publications, Following the Dog into the World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz and How House Cats Tamed Us and Took over the World by Abigail Tucker.  

Dogs v. cats? Now that’s a debate I can always get into. 

BURN PILE: Shirley Jackson, Ouija Boards, and Truman Capote's Ashes

The spookiest month of the year begins tomorrow. Here are some literary tidbits of a decidedly darker nature to get us all in the mood.

  • This week marks the publication of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, a new biography of the oft-overlooked American writer best known for her short story “The Lottery” and the novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Biographer Ruth Franklin reports that Jackson was pegged (and promoted) as somewhat of a domestic “witch” in the early days of her career, and that Jackson took exception to this claim. Later, however, Jackson wrote the following, which should delight those of us who embrace our inner witches: 

I am tired of writing dainty little biographical things that pretend that I am a trim little housewife in a Mother Hubbard stirring up appetizing messes over a wood stove. I live in a dank old place with a ghost that stomps around in the attic room we’ve never gone into (I think it’s walled up) and the first thing I did when we moved in was to make charms in black crayon on all the door sills and window ledges to keep out demons, and was successful in the main. There are mushrooms growing in the cellar, and a number of marble mantels which have an unexplained habit of falling down onto the heads of the neighbors’ children.

At the full of the moon I can be seen out in the backyard digging for mandrakes, of which we have a little patch, along with rhubarb and blackberries. I do not usually care for these herbal or bat wing recipes, because you can never be sure how they will turn out. I rely almost entirely on image and number magic.

BURN PILE: Award Finalists Announced, Jonathan Safran Foer's "Joyless" New Novel, and "Bad" Women

This week, the National Book Award Foundation announced its longlist for the 2016 National Book Award in Fiction, joining its previously announced selections for Non-Fiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature. Finalists in all categories will be announced October 13; winners, November 16. In the meantime, we can all add the following to our fall reading list:

·       The Throwback Special, Chris Bachelder

·       What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell

·       Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett 

·       News of the World, Paulette Jiles 

·       The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Mahajan

·       The Portable Veblen, Elizabeth McKenzie

·       Sweet Lamb of Heaven, Lydia Millet

·       Miss Jane, Brad Watson 

·       The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead  

·       Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson  

The Man Booker Prize Shortlist in Fiction was also announced this week, with the following finalists:

·       Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien

·       The Sellout, Paul Beatty

·       All That Man Is, David Szalay

·       His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet

·       Hot Milk, Deborah Levy

·       Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

The winner will be announced Oct. 25.

In other book news, the LA Times largely pans Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel “Here I Am,” which it calls "joyless" and “kitsch at best.” Meanwhile, LitHub offers readers “10 Books Featuring Subversive Women,” which kicks off with Mary Gaitskill’s excellent—and tenacious—collection Bad Behavior. 

BURN PILE: Setting Rejection Goals, the Dubious Origins of the Six-Word Short Story, and Gene Wilder, Writer

Submission season is finally upon us. Read why setting “rejection goals” can help you meet your publication goals, too. (Plus a perfect analogy from the always inspirational Art & Fear.)

Dream of being as prolific as [insert favorite author’s name here]? You might consider setting your alarm clock an hour earlier—or maybe not? Check out this infographic that compares what time famous writers rise each morning with how much they publish. (The infographic, it should be noted, does not indicate what time said writers went to bed each night.)

It’s back to school time, and soon writing teachers everywhere will be using Hemingway’s infamous “six-word short story” to teach students about the nuts and bolts of narrative. (For the uninitiated, those six words are, “For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”) But that story, it turns out, is likely apocryphal. (Do we care? Don’t forget to submit your own six-word stories here.)

Did you know beloved comedian Gene Wilder, who died this week at age 83, dabbled in both memoir and fiction writing? Check out this LA Times review of his memoir Kiss Me Like a Stranger. Among other nuggets, you’ll learn for which film Wilder was hired because the director needed "an actor who could believably fall in love with a sheep and play it straight." RIP, Gene.

BURN PILE: Elena Ferrante, Deaths, Books to Film, 10th Grade Reading, and the Classics

Enigmatic, pseudonymous Elena Ferrante gives the Guardian a rare interview, discussing the creative freedom afforded by anonymity, her relationship with the "sociocultural ladder," and the "ransacking of the enormous warehouse that is literary tradition."

Authors Harper Lee and Umberto Eco passed away last week on the same day; although the two were from vastly different backgrounds, each brought precision and passion to the world of literature, and shared the commonality of adapting a book (Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Eco's The Name of the Rose) to the big screen. Now, the LA Times looks at how that legacy might operate in a cinematic scene experiencing a renaissance in book-to-film adaptations (Room, Brooklyn, and Mr. Holmes, to name just a few of this year's critical successes). 

Flying in the face of the long-heralded "death of print," artists' books -- texts that mingle literature and art, with a special emphasis on the book as cultural object -- are experiencing a resurgence. Here are ten of the most impressive.

David Denby, writer and former New Yorker film critic, explores the effect of foisting great literature on a generation reared on tablets in his new book, Lit Up: One Reporter, Three Schools, Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives, based on what he witnessed while shadowing 10th-grade English teacher Sean Leon's students at the Beacon School, an alternative public high school in Manhattan.

If you're thinking about what you read in 10th grade and then put down forever, perhaps now's a good time to revisit this iconic instruction manual for reading the classics laid out by Italo Calvino in 1986. His final question: "While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. 'What good will it do you,” they asked, “to know this tune before you die?'"

BURN PILE: Top 20 Books People Lie About Having Read, Mysterious Disappearances, Short Story Vending Machines, McDonald's, and Why Nonfiction

Got an unopened copy of Finnegan’s Wake or Infinite Jest wedged shamefully in the back of your bookcase? Take heart regarding your literary duplicity with this list from the BBC of the top twenty books people lie about having read (20% of which are by Charles Dickens)—and then slap those unread tomes on your bedside table, because 60% of those surveyed said being (or at least seeming) well-read made a person appear more attractive. 

And in China, where it isn’t so much a matter of the books you haven’t read as those you have (illegally): shoppers from the mainland have begun frequenting Hong Kong entrepreneur Paul Tang’s The People’s Bookstore to buy books published legally in Hong Kong but banned on the mainland, mostly those dealing with “high-level political intrigue, sex scandals and the like.” Tang intends to keep his store open despite the recent disappearance of five booksellers at the nearby Causeway Bay Bookstore, which also specializes in banned books. 

Grenoble, France has found a unique way to fill those pesky snatches of time between doing something and doing something else: short-story vending machines. 

In related fast-prose news, McDonald’s has begun its third annual initiative to promote childhood literacy: until February 15th, specially-sized children’s books will replace toys as the prize offered in Happy Meals. This (almost) makes up for the fact that McDonald’s has also recently introduced a kale salad with more fat and calories than a double Big Mac. 

Memoirists Meredith Maran, Dani Shapiro, Ayelet Waldman, Kate Christensen and Nick Flynn explain why they chose nonfiction, as well as the best (and worst) parts of telling the truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIPz625yVYI