Lit-Link Round-up

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Grub Street’s Christopher Castellani’s All This Talk of Love receives a glowing one from the NYTimes.

How friendship forms writers: Emily Rapp’s “How I Became the Woman I Am Today.”

Josh Mohr is one of our best, and this HTML interview is perhaps his most candid.

These autocorrected texts made me laugh so hard I was snorting and crying. I’m embarrassed by how happy they made me. But in case they will make you just as happy, why not spread the joy?

This one’s a month old, but I freaking LOVE this essay on “the safety of transgression vs. the risk of honesty,” by the great Craig Clevenger.

Three Guys, One Books gives it up big time for my Other Voices Books spring writer, Rob Roberge, and his new novel, The Cost of Living. The novel also has a soundtrack—a collaboration between Rob and musician friends like Elliott Goldkind and Steve Wynn. It’s ridiculously good, and it’s ridiculously free, so download it.

Sam Lipsyte does the TNB Self-Interview.

A fascinating exploration of the point of the paperback over at The Millions.

Wish I were at the Indian Wells Arts Festival in LA.

But I’ll be out for the LA Times Festival of Books, and attending this bad-ass thing, with Emily Rapp, Jillian Lauren, Lenore Zion and Rob Roberge, whose band, The Urinals, is also playing. And Rich Ferguson!

On a less LA-focused note: Can new laws in India prevent rape?

And not to end on a downer, but this piece, originally published in the New York Times 10 years after the Rwandan genocide, is just so worth reading.

Well no…let’s end on this instead: the documentary 30 Days with a Call Girl.

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 →