SansPoint

Think about the numbers: 350 fiction programs. 3,000 new graduates per year. Each taking let’s say four workshops, each of which requires three submissions. That’s 36,000 short stories for each graduating class of writers, who have worked to convince each other that the top 1% of short stories - those that come closest to generating workshop consensus - may be published in a literary magazine. A literary magazine whose readership may largely comprise writers looking for a place to publish their short stories. “Guarded self-consciousness” starts to look like a mathematical inevitability. Perversely, then, the greatest danger to the short story may be the very institution that’s sustaining it.

Via The Millions

I’ve only tried in a limited extent to publish my work—though I have made $5 publishing a short story in a defunct online magazine—,and this post fills me with both a little dread and a little hope for getting my words out there on paper, and a check in my pocket.

If you’re a book snob, or a reverse book snob — meaning you’re so well read that you’ve moved on to a pile of bad, vaguely Buddhist self-help books, Austrian military history in iffy translation, alternative fashion magazines, and rereading Pliny for the fourth time, and you try not to talk about this stuff at parties — the first thing you’ll want to do with Book Smart is check out how many of Mallison’s choices you’ve already read. via Bookslut

I’m not sure I can pick twelve books that, in my opinion, would lead to Literary Genius, but I might pick this up as a curiosity.

Should Vladimir Nabokov’s last, unpublished, unfinished novel be burned?

>Dmitri’s predicament goes beyond Laura. It’s one that raises the difficult issue of who “owns” a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it’s in? > Via Metafilter

I’m torn on this one. One the one hand, I’d hate to lose a piece of literary history, but since “the Laura manuscript consists of approximately 50 index cards covered in V.N.’s handwriting” or “some 30 conventional manuscript pages.” I can’t be so certain it’s wrong. If all it needed was editing, and rewriting, I’d say publish it. If it’s in the state it seems to be… burning seems the best option.

Thoughts?

I have often found myself in the delicate situation of having to express my thoughts on books I haven’t read. Because I teach literature at university level, there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that I haven’t even opened. It’s true that this is also the case for the majority of my students, but if even one of them has read the text I’m discussing, there is a risk that at any moment my class will be disrupted and I will find myself humiliated. Via Bookninja

That’s somewhat reassuring for this English undergrad. I’ve had to bluff my way through books I haven’t read or only read partway on multiple occasions. That said, I always feel guilty for it, and I think I always will—one of the sad side effects of having a Librarian mother. I’m going to have to get this guy’s book if/when it comes out in the US.

Starting last weekend, police at the University of California at Santa Barbara began receiving reports from around campus of a particularly academic form of graffiti — red spray-painted allusions to the work of the postmodern author Thomas Pynchon, whose 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 is (in typical fashion) a sprawling admixture of paranoia, counterculture and obscure literary references.