Category: literary life

Haypenny has gone belly up. You can read the editors’ ultimate sign-off here.

Small Spiral Notebook is launching a print edition this winter, and the first issue includes fiction by Tara Wray, Paul A. Toth, David Barringer, Brian Ames, and Felicia Sullivan, as well as interviews with Aimee Bender and Beth Ann Bauman. You can pre-order a copy here.

The Telegraph has an article on absinthe.

Its literary devotees believed absinthe freed the imagination. According to Wilde, the first stage in its consumption was “like ordinary drinking”, in the second “you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful and curious things”. At one time or another, both the brilliance and the mental problems of many artists and writers, from van Gogh to Strindberg, have been attributed to absinthe.

Somewhere in there is a book review, too.

Photographs that had been stored by Ernest Hemingway at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West are said to be those that had been given him by Walker Evans when the two were in Cuba in the 1930s. You can see some of Walker Evans’ other photographs here.

So I scored 7 out of 10: Not bad (but no cigar, Pharaoh or otherwise). I would have taken the quiz a bit more seriously if they’d spelled Georges R&eacutemi correctly.

You gotta love the headline of this piece on an Elmore Leonard reading in Palm Beach, Florida. Dude, if there were any secrets, wouldn’t they be out by now? The PB Post writer continues waxing about said secrets well into the article.

[Elmore Leonard] lifted the veil several times in his talk, making unbelievable literary success sound unbelievably simple. It involves setting up chapters as scenes, and letting the characters talk. Leonard said he simply tries to be invisible.

So now you know the secret. What are you waiting for? Go and write.