Lit-Link Round-up

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In celebration of Valentine’s Day, I give you the most insanely romantic thing I’ve ever read. I want this adorable old Russian couple on my mantle. If I had a mantle, that is.

A love affair between a lonely woman and a tortoise. The divine Caroline Leavitt in the New York Times‘ “Modern Love.”

Finalists announced for the Black Lawrence Press St. Lawrence Book Award.

Chicago tanks at #31 on the “most literate cities” list. DC ranks #1, with Seattle and Minneapolis following.

My goal is to figure out PayPal so I can buy Steve Almond’s Writs of Passion for my poor mom for Valentine’s Day. She’s cooped up in a rehab nursing home until March 1. My mom, she’s a big fan of the Steves (loves her some Stephen Elliott too and subscribes to both the Daily Rumpus and Letters in the Mail). She’s 80. She may not be that Russian couple, but her adorableness would make some damn fine mantle icing too.

Roy Kesey is Electric Literature‘s “Recommended Read” this week.

A few weeks ago one of my short stories, “My Parasite,” appeared on The Rumpus…I’m giddy that it also ended up selected for Ploughshares’ new “The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week” feature. Thanks, Lyndsey Reese, for a fabulously in-depth review!

Why do some kids respond well to pressure while others fall apart? The New York Times reports on the kind of judgmentally named Warriors vs. Worriers phenomenon. This should probably be required reading for our Hellicopter Parent generation.

Speaking of parenting…a huge congratulations to Thea Goodman on her debut novel, The Sunshine When She’s Gone. Having a day when you think maybe you could win the lamest-parent-ever award? Meet John, who has somehow ended up on a plane to Barbados with his infant daughter; he will run brilliantly neurotic, suspenseful circles around you.

Please don’t kill me, Emily or Stephen. I love this photo of Emily’s SO DAMN MUCH, I just had to share it here. Are they glam, people, or what? This should be a book cover. 

Gina Frangello is the author of four books of fiction and a forthcoming memoir, Blow Your House Down. Her novel A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014) is currently under development by Netflix as a series produced by Charlize Theron’s production company, Denver & Delilah. Her most recent novel, Every Kind of Wanting (Counterpoint 2016) was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including Chicago Magazine’s and The Chicago Review of Books’. She has nearly 20 years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books, and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, and as the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, the LA Times, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and in many other magazines and anthologies. After two decades of teaching at many universities, including UIC, Northwestern’s School of Continuing Studies, UCLA Extension, the University of California Riverside Palm Desert, Roosevelt University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago, Gina is excited to be a student again at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Program for Writers, where she has returned to complete the PhD she left unfinished twenty years ago. More from this author →