Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Tweeting And Writing
“I’m Working On My Novel” is Los Angeles-based artist Cory Arcangel’s latest project. Working with appropriation and social media, the artist handpicked and collected tweets from aspiring writers and novelists about their writing, to be published in a curated anthology out…
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Write like an Assassin
I have to remind myself that all is permissible. Art has to be a free space. Language has to be a free space. And I just shouldn’t worry about that kind of thing while I’m working. I might pay the…
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Bill Murray and Me
Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, you come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world’s happy property…
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The Greatest Short Story of All-Time
“Kipling,” says a psychiatrist friend of mine, “was always pretending to be something other than he actually was—which was a 10-year-old boy.” His work, the best of it, has a boy’s barbarism and a boy’s conservatism. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” succeeds so spectacularly…
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The Hawking Index
The Hawking Index was created by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg to measure how much of a book readers were actually reading, by analyzing Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” feature on Kindle devices. Over at the Guardian, writer and literary critic Alex Clark and…
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Weird Fiction
Jeff VanderMeer has put together a selection of eight new “weird fiction” books for a name-your-price bundle, out now and for a limited time only at Storybundle.
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E-Remorse and Writers
Most literate adults can tell e-disaster stories: information sent to the wrong recipient or group, or discovered by the wrong person, or issued in careless wording that gave offense, or did real damage. Some of these stories are funny. Some…
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Saving a Book’s Life
The rules of shelving can seem arbitrary, even arcane, but the fundamentals are easy to learn: two hard covers, and no more than three paperbacks of the same title, on each shelf. The exception is the face-out. If the jacket…
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The Women of Brooklyn
I can confirm, based on my own reading list this spring, that there is no shortage of fiction set in Brooklyn. In fact, you could almost say that the Lethems and, more recently, the Lins have been supplanted: It’s been…
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Flattened Librarian
In the story, a young girl, Nancy, mysteriously receives a single Christmas gift – the steamroller. She takes the gift out for a ride and flattens many things along the way, one of which was human, as I recall. I…
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The Salinger Year
My time at the Agency and reading Salinger brought me back to that state when you’re a kid or an adolescent – or just a person! – who reads for pleasure. I was able to go back to the pre-academic…