This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: Medium
This Week In Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
At Lit Hub, Jonathan Reiber, a former speechwriter for the Obama administration, weighs our souls and our words during this political transition. Chivas Sandage writes for The Rumpus about helping the men in our lives to fully understand the constant state of vigilance women live in. On Medium, Abbie VanSickle takes a thoughtful, personal look at the […]
...morePublish a Book in Twelve Easy Steps
Comedian Sara Benincasa is no stranger to being a working writer—in fact, she just wrote a book about it. Now, at Medium, she shares her secrets on getting published. Accessible and funny, Benincasa offers tips like “NO MONEY UPFRONT BECAUSE ANY AGENT WHO DOES THAT IS A CROOK,” details about advances and royalties, and the always-important […]
...morePaper Memories
At Medium, Melissa Mesku, founding editor of New Worker Magazine, writes about what it was like to sort through thirty years’ worth of journals, diaries, notes, and scraps of paper: Those handwritten pages contained everything I was — everything I’d ever been, wanted, thought, hoped. They were just sitting there, collecting dust, taking up space. In the slow […]
...moreFree Rant
Pete Ross takes huge issue with the infiltration of content marketers and voracious “personal brand” builders at Medium and elsewhere. His point is clear: writing is more than posturing to sell yourself as a writer: All you’re trying to do is get a dopamine response from people, in turn getting a dopamine response yourself through […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Is indie publishing dead or just moving over to Medium? Your money is snitching on you. Are you schizophrenic? There’s an app for that. Alert: More hand-wringing over technology ruining things. This time, the death we mourn is live music.
...moreThe Bible and Birdie Jean
At twelve, my grandfather climbed into his Prayer Tower and said he’d die if he didn’t get $8 million; I was a gay kid living on a Pentecostal compound with an autographed photo of Ronald Reagan on my desk. At eighteen I left most of that behind, rarely looking back. Randy Potts, grandson of evangelist […]
...moreFor the Love of Good Grammar
Bryan Henderson has made more than 47,000 edits to Wikipedia. This prolific career is not the product of Henderson’s great breath of knowledge, but rather because he has an obsession with fixing a specific grammatical mistake. The mistake he corrects over and over again is composed of two words: “comprised of.” His efforts to remove […]
...moreDumb Luck
Fred Vinturini explains over at Medium how he happenstanced into becoming an author: She finally turns to me and asks me what’s the secret to getting published. How did I get my seat at the front of the Powell’s event next to Chuck. I’m almost surprised that she finally realizes I exist up there, and […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Some story collections drop with fireworks and great fanfare, while others make their entrance, it could be said, on tender feet. The latter is the case with the works of Edith Pearlman, who released her fifth story collection, Honeydew, on Tuesday. Laura Van Den Berg had some kind words for the book at the New […]
...moreSince We Last Spoke
Paul Ford touches on the delicate art of reconnecting over email, after years and years of silence, for Medium.
...moreWord of the Day: Atrabilious
(adj.); gloomy, morose, or morbid; bad-tempered, irritable; from the Latin agra bili(s) (“black bile”) “Caleb stopped, massaged, then stopped again, as though he felt something under the skin. ‘Too big to be a morphine pump,’ he said cheerfully. At 32 years old, fresh-faced and boyishly handsome, he looks less like an undertaker than like the […]
...moreJust Do the Hard Things
Sara Benincasa has some inspiring words over at Medium: You must tell people exactly what you want from them if you have any hope that they will give it to you. I asked people to review my book (well, my publisher asked them to review my book) in the hopes that everyone would love it and […]
...moreDistress Calls
There’s hardly an American who can’t find a helpline, unless that American’s a pedophile in remission. Convinced that the lack of said resource is dire, needed, and far from forthcoming, Luke Malone investigates the grisly alternatives; in an essay at Medium, Malone interviews Adam, a self-admitted 16 year old pedophile: I spoke with experts and […]
...moreThe Never-Ending Search for Shelf Space
Libraries are continuously purchasing new books, but the only way to make room for new titles is by removing old ones. Phyllis Rose explores the process of libraries’ acquisition and disposal of books in The Shelf, excerpted at Medium. Looking to save a beloved but otherwise obscure title? Check it out from time to time, […]
...moreFeel Validated, Artists
The biggest myth we are fed as artists is that we need to sustain ourselves solely on our art. This is ridiculous. Every artist has at some point in time had some other job. Some of them kept these jobs their entire lives. In the latter category: William Carlos Williams was a doctor in New […]
...moreMy Book Failed
Emily Gould is broke. Writing her first book got her into debt, which leaves her to wonder, now what? She muses, “How could someone who had been so mistaken about the narrative structure of her own life hope to write a novel?” Read the rest of her journey so far on Medium.
...moreHow Has the Internet Changed Longform Journalism?
Ideally, online longform nonfiction combines the strengths of the print world with those of the Internet, granting writers the rigorous editing and reporting resources they’d get at a magazine but freeing them from the constraints of word limits and limited audiences. So what’s with the backlash against longreads? Buzzfeed’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith explains at Medium.
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