Posts by author
Victor Luo
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When White Saviors Create Literary Journals
Hey! We’re white! And we all voted for Obama! Twice! We should do something to help the literary downtrodden. American literature is already frustrating enough with publishing sorely lacking in diversity. But things can be even worse when the white-dominated industry…
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Getting Lost at the London Book Fair
AWP was only a few weeks ago, but the book world just doesn’t stop moving. The London Book Fair, the world’s largest book rights fair, is bustling with talks of what’s on the horizon with book trends (think adult coloring books). Over…
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Advice for Writers Anxious of Rejection
I know of no level of success where writers stop getting rejected (and stop at least occasionally feeling bummed about it). People generally make more noise about publications than rejections, the same way people mostly share pictures of happy moments…
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A Focus Group for Poetry
Is workshop not giving you enough helpful feedback on your poetry? Try framing a focus group about poetry instead.
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On Giving Public Readings
I’ve always been attracted to live readings for the performance. Whether I’m a reader or an audience member, readings provide a sense of community and connection that’s absent from the solitary act of reading. As anyone who’s ever been to…
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Book Marketing in Five Minutes or Less
Does the idea of marketing the book you’ve slaved over for years cause nothing but dread? No problem! Minimize the time you spend thinking about your book’s promotion by taking small steps that can be completed in five minutes or…
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Prescribing Poetry with Pills
There are things poetry can do and things it can’t. And while my aim is to ease suffering, sometimes the work is to be with it. Finding the words to console someone ill or grieving is an intensely complicated process.…
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Sad Meals in a Sad Novel
Eating while alone can be a sad experience. At The Toast, read about all the sad meals in the sad novel Wuthering Heights.
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Emily Dickinson Wasn’t Crazy
Emily Dickinson continues to appeal to literary critics fascinated by her poetry’s terse and alarming emotional breadth. Many biographies attribute her emotional poetry to a sense of agoraphobia, but at Lit Hub, Jerome Charyn makes the case for Emily Dickinson…
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Drinking Games for Literary Fiction
If reading literary fiction isn’t already an enthralling activity for you, why not try a drinking game to go along with it? McSweeney’s has a pretty good one, including such gems like drinking if there’s footnotes or an overdetermined car…
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The Complicated Blurring of Reality, Fiction, and Social Work
What can a person really know for sure, except that one is the writer of the thing one is writing? When you type the words this writer, you are on solid ground for a moment, as solid as you can get in…
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Lemon-Drizzled Cakes Bring J.K. Rowling to Your Book Club
There are no shortages of serendipitous tales of celebrities meeting up with their average-Joe fans through something as small as a Twitter exchange. For one library in Scotland, an exchange of teasing Twitter messages led to J.K. Rowling making an…