Electric Literature
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A Good Film Is Hard To Find
For Electric Literature’s podcast Ryder + Flye, Jason Diamond chats with author Margaret Elby about why so few of Flannery O’Connor’s works have been adapted for the big screen, and more.
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Writing Memory
I think we all live in different ways. Some people don’t look back; some people dwell on the past. They are surrounded by mementos and pictures of the past. Other people don’t want to do that. It really depends on…
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Right on Time
The debate has typically been framed around whether it is ever appropriate for a writer to reference Seinfeld, Bright Eyes, or Facebook. What makes more sense is to talk about whether or not doing so is helpful for the specific…
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Capturing the Movement of Consciousness
For Electric Literature, Laura Preston interviews Garth Greenwell about his recent debut novel What Belongs to You. The two discuss what led Greenwell to transition from writing poetry to fiction, his experiences teaching in Bulgaria, and English syntax: I’m endlessly fascinated with…
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The Next Day
The late David Bowie was a great inspiration for many different authors. Over at Electric Literature, some of them—including Aleksander Hemon, Porochista Khakpour, Ru Freeman, Amber Sparks, and Marie-Helene Bertino—reveal how the British artist influenced their life and work.
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The History of a Novel’s First Sentence
The great first sentence is not just a step on the path to a story but its own self-sufficient enterprise. Is it so easy to extract because it was unnaturally grafted on in the first place? We all know the obvious…
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Art Is Not A Formula
Electric Literature’s Lincoln Michel writes a rebuttal to a recent Atlantic article “All Stories Are The Same,” which attempts to reduce stories to basic formulas. Michel argues: These self-congratulatory attempts to reduce art to formula rarely tell us anything useful about stories. These formulas…
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The Writing Life in Nigeria
A new essay by Nigerian author A. Igoni Barrett (Love Is Power, or Something Like That and Blackass) highlights the ways poverty and struggle work against those in Nigeria who would be writers: I found nothing there for me [at…
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Publishing on Coffee Sleeves
Artmaking is a particularly human occupation. It deserves celebrating in small and big ways. Following the trend of microfiction on Chipotle bags and short story vending machines, a new endeavor from Coffee House Press called Coffee Sleeve Conversations is setting out…
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Where Are All The “Good” Guys?
For Electric Literature, Liesl Schillinger reflects on his struggles to find examples of “good” men in contemporary fiction, and shares his joy in finding one in Lauren Groff‘s Fates and Furies. Further, he argues that despite the self-deprecating narrator in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle,…
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The Rumpus Interview with Elisa Gabbert
Author Elisa Gabbert talks about her books, The Self Unstable and The French Exit, diversity, publishing, whiteness, and writing in the Internet Age.
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Opened and Raw
The violence enters together with the beauty. Over at Electric Literature, Claire Schwartz writes about the power of recitation from memory, and about entering the poetry of Ai through memorization and rhythm and never leaving, despite the discomfort, the burning.