Lincoln Michel
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Talk Literary to Me
The artist statement is not just a representation of what you are working on, but an intervention in what you are working on. If you start saying, I aim to do this and not to do this, maybe it keeps…
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Writing = Work = Job
Settling the debate about whether “writer” is job that arose with Merritt Tierce’s Marie Claire essay about going broke post-debut novel, and a response piece by Ester Bloom at The Billfold calling writing a hobby, Lincoln Michel finds a middle ground between…
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Writing Gives Me No Happiness
A novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never. Over at VICE, Lincoln Michel nabbed the elusive and brilliant Joy Williams for an interview about her newest short story collection, ninety-nine stories of God. Her answers are wonderful in…
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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Publishing
At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel talks about the “taboo” topic of book sales, and offers some advice for writers: Writers should absolutely write with an eye toward art, not markets. Thinking about sales while creating art rarely produces anything good.…
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Fairytales Still Make Our Skin Crawl
Fairytales can be seen as formulaic, but these formulas provide the bones for modern writers to fill in as they please; adaptations of classic fairytales are still making bestseller lists and hitting the box office every few months, showing how…
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Notable NYC: 4/23–4/29
Saturday 4/23: Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, Jadele McPherson, t’ai freedom ford, and Val Jeanty read poems of surrealism and politics. High Line Park at 23rd Street, 3 p.m., free. Tonya Foster celebrates Swarm of Bees with Marcella Durand, Charles Bernstein,…
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Tech Companies Profit While Writers Starve
Digital media companies are suddenly worried about declining ad revenue, and the venture capitalists funding these companies have also turned off the faucet of cash as they realize that success stories like BuzzFeed and Mashable are not the unicorns everyone…
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Books Without Authors
At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel wonders why readers care so much about Elena Ferrante’s “real” identity, particularly when the anonymous author has made it clear that she believes books “have no need of their authors” after they’ve been penned. Michel…
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Agents and Editors and Readers! Oh My!
At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel offers a sharp response to a recent Atlantic article that explores how MFA programs have influenced contemporary literature: The MFA is only two to three years out of a writer’s life. Those years don’t outweigh decades of signaling…
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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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A Rumpus Book Club Subscription Makes a Great Gift
We’re at that point in the holiday shopping season where if you don’t already have a gift for someone, you either have to deal with the other last-minute shoppers in stores, pay an outrageous shipping rate online and hope the post…
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Notable NYC: 12/12–12/18
Saturday 12/12: Diana Hamilton and Steve McCaffery join the Segue series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Many people read Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. Housing Works, 1 p.m., free. Brian Matthew Kim, Ann Podracky, Jolie Hale, and Jason N. Fischedick…