The Universal Threat of Loneliness
“The End of Solitude” by William Deresiewicz begins with the question, “What does the contemporary self want?” He answers after two sentences: “Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming…
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Elissa Bassist
115 posts
Elissa Bassist edits the Funny Women column and teaches humor writing. Her next class is "How to Write a Comedic Memoir" on 3/30. She wrote Hysterical, a semi-finalist for The Thurber Prize for American humor, and is co-writing Inside Jokes: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers with Caitlin Kunkel (out in 2026). Her newsletter is Tragedy Plus Time.
Last Week in the New Yorker: a Link List and Review
THE TALK OF THE TOWN TRANSITIONING by Hendrik Hertzberg You can always count on Hendrick Hertzberg to tell you what your new political stance is; more than that, he makes your…
Unlove: a Literary Break-Up List
To list all the poetry and prose concerned with love and/or anti-love would be to write a list of all the books ever written, and so below is an extraordinarily…
Subway Map of Publishing Trends
Concerned about the direction of print media? Soybits, a Spanish blog about “digital publishing and its peculiarities,” created an intricate Subway-style map based on 2008 publishing trends and projecting out.…
Write What You Know: Random Book Links by Elissa Bassist
James Wolcott’s review of Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick summed up in one piece of advice: skip the first third of the book. Unlike Hemingway, Plath, Wolfe, et al., Updike…
Jonathan Baumbach Superlink
Writing (a novel, this post, anything) is “a bit like love.” Few are in it for the money or self-esteem; you pursue it because you can’t not and because at…
Companion Links to Ariel Levy’s Article on The Joy of Sex
“If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on The Joy of Sex, you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations.”