Lit-Link Round-up

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Unveiling the new dates/site/faculty for Other Voices Querétaro, the writing program I run out of Mexico. Come join us June 27-July 6, with a hotbed of Rumpus alum faculty: Cecil Castellucci, Rob Roberge, Emily Rapp, Stacy Bierlein, and of course I will be there, doing individual manuscript consults and running around like a chicken with my head cut off, of course. Accepting applications immediately!

South London school bans “informal language” like the slang terms “innit” and “like” from usage by students.

List of reasons for admission to an insane asylum in the late 1800s. Who are you kidding–you don’t even need to wonder if you’d be eligible for admission: it’s a given.

Illinois has recently joined the states where use of medical marijuana is approved. Chicago Now celebrates with 5 Amazing Facts you may not know.

SheWrites founder, Kami Wicoff, turns down a novel deal from the Big Five to publish her book through SheWrites Press. Congrats on the novel, Kami!

David Sedaris writes in the New Yorker about his youngest sister’s suicide.

Have you heard about this incredibly cool Sherman Alexie scheme to turn authors into indie-bookstore superhero handsellers for a day?

Take a personality quiz to find out which State you should live in. (Um, though FYI, I don’t plan to relocate to “Georgia” anytime soon…)

18 Best Brunch joints in Chicago (for those of us not moving to Georgia, you know…)

And want to be inspired. Wow. Books change lives every day, and as an example, check out this moving piece on how Naomi Benaron’s novel, Running the Rift, inspired a family to change their lives and undertake a medical mission to Rwanda.

And lest you were starting to feel a little too good and need to be riled up and depressed: The Daily Beast probes the Men’s Rights Movement in “The Masculine Mystique.”

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 →