Lit-Link Round-up

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Brooklyn Based offers Three Reading Lists from People Who Still Love Books.

The Millions’ interview with literary powerhouse Elissa Schappell.

It may not pay your mortgage, but in this day of shrinking paying markets, Barrelhouse‘s announcement that it will begin offering $50 for work, while its staff still works for free, is worth noting. This is the model I had for a decade when editing Other Voices magazine. It’s not exactly a model of entreprenurial genius, maybe, and it’s plain impossible for some publications…but it always made me happy. Hats off to the Barrelhouse gang.

The trailer for Thea Goodman’s buzz-gathering novel, The Sunshine When She’s Gone.

This interview with Karen Russell seriously rocked.

Just kill me, this list of the 30 Best Places to Be If You Love Books is so freaking glorious. Wow.

As fascinating in another way are these 25 photos of famous writers–from Tao Lin to Hemingway–at home.

Can I confess that I don’t entirely understand the Tournament of Books? But the list of finalists is so amazing that I feel like maybe I need to figure it out.

The brilliantly bad-ass Nami Mun sits down with Chicago Literati.

And things to do while there’s no pope.

Lots of AWP snarkers this time of the year. Here, Ploughshares plays it straight with advice from seasoned editors to newbies at the 2013 conference. And this piece from Jennifer Spiegel was a charming breath of fresh air. Meanwhile, no round-up next week, people, as I’ll be sleeping off the conference…but until then, see you at the book fair! I’ll be the gleeful Pollyanna double-booking my boozy lunch dates and passing out Men Undressed condoms, still having fun since 1999!


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 →