Elissa Bassist edits the Funny Women column. She teaches humor writing at The New School and Catapult. Follow her on Twitter, and visit elissabassist.com for more literary, feminist, and personal criticism.
Dear Writers, So, you’ve decided you’re a woman or gender non-conforming writer and would like to submit to Funny Women. Out of all decisions, this is the best one you…
Were you at August’s Monthly Rumpus? Look at how much fun you had here. Were you not at August’s Monthly Rumpus? Look at a projection of how much fun you could…
I have read Kafka’s letters and Flaubert’s letters and Jane Austen’s letters. These authors are a part of my “adult” life. But I haven’t read the letters of authors who…
When I think about good books, I think about this: -Never read a bad book/book you don’t like 50 pages in; it’s wasteful. -You will die someday; read accordingly. -Reading…
In the upcoming New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes about Edith Wharton’s letters to her governess, Anna Bahlmann. “Wharton had requested that her letters be destroyed, but Bahlmann’s family ignored her…
Ron Charles of the Washington Post reports on Electric Literature, a new bi-monthly magazine that is making lit. mags differently. I’ve noted five lessons about publishing via Electric Literature’s watershed…
“Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women?” inquired Christopher Hitchens in “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair, January 2007. That’s a good question. And…
Infinite Summer is a Web site presenting the world with the following challenge/life-better-maker: “Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷…
“Freely pouring his emotions into the letters, Kafka is, by turns, passionate [‘I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong…