Lit-Link Round-up

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PEN 2013 Literary Winners announced.

Did I link this kick-ass piece last week?  I’ve been sending it to every memoirist I know and people are really responding to it.

FC2’s Sukenick and Doctorow prizes open their doors to submissions.

Alex Chee and the Center for Fiction offer a course for writers of long stories and novellas.

Did you catch The Rumpus’ interview with the madcap and smart as hell Literary Disco trio?

If you live in a cave, or, you know, were recently hospitalized for E. coli and got behind on every single thing that has ever existed in your life, you may have missed Colbert’s much-lauded Best Episode Ever.

Do I have to fear a low-IQ if I’m not so crazy about hallucinogens?  Move over, Jim-on-Taxi; in real life, there’s a lot of LSD on this list of geniuses and their drugs of choice…

Charmin goes Kafka?

Seriously?  Um…wow.  Some 15 year old kid develops a way to diagnose cancer within a few minutes as a science fair project.  Is this for real?

The Atlantic‘s Murder by Craigslist.

Congrats to Kate Milliken on her debut collection’s first review!  And to Sari Wilson on a kick-ass book deal for her debut novel, to Terry Karten at HarperCollins!

Omfg.  Lifetime is making a Flowers in the Attic movie and little Sally Draper is playing Cathy, the Laura Spenser of pop fiction.  I guess romanticizing rape never gets old?  Not to mention BDSM grandma-scenes.  My daughters are older than I was when I devoured this book, and yes, I am now old enough to find that horrifying.

Speaking of kids: now they’re doomed if they get stomach aches.  I don’t know what to make of this.  Zoe Zolbrod had a good discussion of it on her FB wall.  On the one hand, sure, this correlation makes sense.  Everyone knows stomach issues and anxiety do have some Venn Diagram overlap.  Common sense would dictate that anxious kids are at higher risk of becoming anxious adults.  Sure, I buy it, okay.  On the other hand, everyone I’ve ever liked in my life is probably prone to anxiety.  What is it about the United States where Perfection is assumed to be the natural state of human health and anything short of that is a deviation from some imaginary norm?  This rubs me the wrong way, even if it’s true.

Famous historic b&w photographs, from disasters to Tesla, colorized.

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 →