I am here for this lithub article on The Rooms Where 20 Famous Books Were Written. Living like this description of Edith Wharton is my life goal: Edith Wharton famously did most of her writing in bed (longhand, in the mornings, with her dogs). In her bedroom at The Mount, she wrote the book that would make her famous, The House of Mirth, as well as Ethan Frome, dropping each finished page to the floor for her secretary to pick up, organize, and type. Also, of all the rooms featured, I think the exiled Victor Hugo’s “Crystal Room” would be my first choice.
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Male Novelist Description Generator
So Electric Literature has created a Male Novelist Description Generator. The description of me would read: “She had a rump like a silken waterfall and I thirsted to marry her.” I’ll take it. Go to the description generator and see what yours would be.
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5 Women In Publishing Talk About Why Books About Race And Gender Are So Popular Now
There’s a very interesting article at Buzzfeed where five women who work in publishing talk about identity in the business. They really get into the nuances of what what happens when writers from a marginalized group achieve mainstream success (or at least recognition): KB [Kathryn Belden]: To my mind, the more the industry opens up to acquiring books from a wider array of voices and experiences, and the more the market responds positively to reading these works, the better for everyone: for book sales, for the world of literature, for cultural understanding…Anecdotally, I have seen the very positive impact publishing books can have on individuals. While publishing can be a disappointing…
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At the Guardian “‘Messy attics of the mind’: what’s inside a writer’s notebook?”
Notebooks aka ‘Messy attics of the mind’ I’m living for this article at The Guardian by Susie Boyt about the notebooks of writers. I have to admit, I use the notes feature of my phone and iPad far more than I use an actual pen and paper. I was tired of scribbling down ideas and then immediately losing them. Now, I can just go through my notes and try to figure out what I was trying to remember when I wrote: “what if vampires are real?” and “holy hell destroyed the fiery feel.” Messy attics of the mind’: what’s inside a writer’s notebook?
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Maybe don’t turn these books into movies
I love books and I love movies and TV. An adaptation in the right hands can be a beautiful thing. Combining good source material with the right director’s vision can produce something great, like mixing chocolate and peanut butter. But not always. Sometimes a book really struggles in its adaptation and what comes out is less peanut butter and chocolate and more orange juice and toothpaste. For instance, I have loved just about every big (and little) screen version of Jane Austen’s novels. There’s something about the romance, setting, costume, and characters of Austen that make these books shine on a screen. And then there are the others – the books…
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Jane Austen knew what was up
In depressing news, this article at the Guardian goes into the decline of women characters and writers. Academics from the universities of Illinois and California at Berkeley used an algorithm to examine 104,000 works of fiction dating from 1780 to 2007, drawn mostly from HathiTrust Digital Library. The algorithm identified both author and character genders. The academics expected to see an increase in the prominence of female characters in literature across the two centuries. Instead, “from the 19th century through the early 1960s we see a story of steady decline,” write Ted Underwood, David Bamman and Sabrina Lee in their paper The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction, which has just…
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Writer Find Fridays
There’s a lot of great writing out there and on Fridays I like to highlight writers who I like and I think you might like too. Today’s entry: Caity Weaver Where she writes: GQ Where you might know her from: Gawker Twitter Handle: @caityweaver It was a sad day when Gawker went under. I still sometimes find myself typing the URL without realizing it. Caity now writes for GQ where she continues to be hilarious. A Few highlights: She wrote a series called The Best Restaurant in New York Is with Rich Juzwiak. In the series they visited some of the most touristy restaurants in New York, the restaurant in the…
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Literary Hub takes you on a tour to 35 literary bars and cafes from around the world
Emily Temple, over at Literary Hub, takes readers on a tour of 35 different bars and cafes where libations were sipped by writers and literary luminaries. I personally am not a fan of writing anywhere other than my desk. I’ve tried working in coffee shops, but I just can’t relax – let alone write. I feel exposed, like a deer eating its way through a prize-winning garden right in front of the owner’s sliding glass door. I’m going to be spotted any moment! Of course, the people on this list weren’t actually writing in these cafes. They were drinking and procrastinating, something I that I have done in a cafe. So me and…
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The Paris Review Explores Selika, Mystery of the Belle Epoque
In a short piece over at the Paris Review, Susanna Forrest attempts to discover who Selika was. Working with nothing more than six pictures which turned up on Tumblr in 2012, Susanna tries to find something, anything about this enigmatic, tragic figure. This much I do know: she was a black amazone in Belle Epoque Paris, a city where black “Amazons” were shown in a human zoo; she was a celebrity who left no other trace than these six tokens of her celebrity; she was a horsewoman without a horse, a power hinted at but not granted. The whole thing is well worth a read.
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Sunfish Pond
Sunfish Pond Not far from where I grew up, there is a well-celebrated hiking path called “Sunfish Pond.” The path lies on the New Jersey side of the Delaware Water Gap and it’s called Sunfish Pond because that is the reward waiting for your at the summit. It’s over seven miles to the top, uphill the entire way. You have to climb up and over huge boulders and skirt the edges of cliffs, but when you finally make it to the top you’re rewarded with an untouched freshwater lake that’s clear enough to see through. The waters of the pond are fed from a spring deep within the mountains and…
