Lit-Link Round-up

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Who gets $20K a pop? HuffPo clues us in to authors’ outrageous speaking fees.

The links between vegetarianism and oral sex? Body image and sex drive? OKCupid has that graphed.

Chloe Caldwell on learning to sit still and deal with herself, post-heroin. I really like her work.

Three rules for dating again (after 25 years of marriage) from Bernadette Murphy, on RoleReboot.

The New York Times touted the internet’s revived interest in short fiction, tantalizing us all with movie deals. Salon‘s Laura Miller hates to break it to you, but it’s bull.

Submit to Black Lawrence Press’s Hudson Prize.

(And seriously: have you done your NEA grant application yet? The deadline is February 28. The application is about 370 pages long and seems to require a degree in layout and design. Procure a psychiatrist and have your Klonopin at the ready. I haven’t done mine yet. Will I? Oh man, I just don’t know…)

The LA Times Book Prize finalists announced. Congrats to Jamie Attenberg, David Abrams, Michael Chabon, Lydia Millet, Lauren Groff, and more!

Jessa Crispin, aka Bookslut, has placed her debut book, EX, with University of Chicago Press. I’m ridiculously excited to read this. Jessa’s intellect is formidable. She just crackles.

This is late, but I don’t think I announced here that my ridiculously brilliant and amazine editor, Chuck Adams, was the recipient of the Barnes & Noble Editor’s Award. I’m so thrilled to be working with this man.

The luminous Jill Alexander Essbaum, sassy poet extraordinaire, is kicking it around in the NYTimes again…

And in case you were wondering, Joshua Mohr, subject of today’s Sunday Rumpus interview, went with the suit for his release party. I don’t have a pic, so instead here’s HuffPo’s review of Fight Song, essentially hailing Josh as the voice of his generation.

I wish I could end there, but no: here’s something truly depressing about how to buy your way onto the NYTimes bestseller list. I thought this was just the kind of thing we writers complain about when drunk and maudlin. I liked my vision of the world better when I thought we were a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists. This is truly bullshit.

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 →