Lit-Link Round-up

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So all Pam Houston’s slots were taken in Other Voices Queretaro, but two have suddenly opened up. Want to study with Pam in Mexico this July 5-14? Rob Roberge and Josip Novakovich are teaching too. Check it out!

Amazing yoga-lit retreat opportunity: enter the 5 Most Beautiful Things contest with Rumpus contributor Jen Pastiloff.

Mary L Tabor interviews powerhouse Margaret Brown of Shelf Unbound on Rare Bird Radio.

StyleSubstanceSoul runs an open letter to Angelina Jolie. And then on The Weeklings: “Angelina Jolie and I Have Two Different Health Care Systems.”

Rebecca Makkai reads from her next novel and discusses what nine-year-old boys have taught her about writing on All Write Already.

The Top 25 Underrated MFA Programs become a less-well-kept-secret on HuffPo.

The Great Gatsby, Kafka, fathers, the Knicks, panties…This Podcast Will Change Your Life.

Speaking of Ben Tanzer, have you read “Bed Sex“?

I wrote my first creative nonfiction piece in a year and a half, since my friend Kathy dropped dead on her floor in December 2011, and various things led me to conclude that I might never write a personal essay again. Of course, as writers tend to be, I was wrong about that. Thanks to The Nervous Breakdown for giving me a forum for these infrequent-but-really-personal pieces, five of which have centered largely on my eccentric father, a kind of Italian Woody Allen…with hallucinations. “This Is Happiness.”

Some photos from last week in Chicago, featuring Rumpus Book Club writers Ru Freeman and Emily Rapp, as well as contributors Rob Roberge and Rachel DeWoskin, and the fabulous writers Terese Svoboda and Sheri Joseph. Aren’t they all pretty?

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Rach and Em

 


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 →