What I Read On And Off The Internet This Week - 10/7
A summary of my week in literary tabs and books, plus another new essay from me at Guernica on the queer roots of Dracula (Whitman, Wilde and Stoker) and our very idea of what a monster is.
This week’s round-up is focused on monsters and the short story. Monsters first:
1916 Rider & Son edition, courtesy of Wikipedia
Restless Books reached out a few years ago and asked me to write a foreword for their new edition of Dracula. That essay appeared this week in Guernica’s Monsters Issue, and describes the story of Dracula’s unlikely inspiration: Walt Whitman. The new volume has original illustrations by Kaitlan Chan and an introduction from Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
The first of my third person letters project here went out this week.
I asked on social media recently about favorite recent short-short fiction as my list for teaching at that length felt pretty dated to me. Some new favorites:
Venita Blackburn (her forthcoming new novel is amazing btw)
If you have any favorites to add to the list, please do leave them in the comments.
A friend asked me for my favorite writing craft books. What follows here is by no means complete and again, if you have any favorites, please add them to the comments.
Craft and Conscience, edited by Kavita Das (I am in this one)
Six Memos to the Next Millennium, by Italo Calvino
Aspects of the Novel, by E. M. Forster
The Writing of Fiction, by Edith Wharton (with new foreword by Brandon Taylor!)
Body Work, by Melissa Febos
Craft in the Real World, by Matthew Salesses
The Stranger's Journey, by David Mura
The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick
Inventing The Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser
The Writers Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House and The Writers Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House
Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway
Burning Down The House, by Charles Baxter
The Art of Time in Fiction, by Joan Silber
The Art of Intimacy, by Stacey D'Erasmo
Viet Thanh Nguyen is currently the speaker in the same Harvard lecture series that produced Calvino’s Six Memos to the Next Millennium. The first, “On the Double, or Inauthenticity,” is on YouTube now.
The Gettysburg Review has been abruptly closed by Gettysburg College, without reason or warning or even the recourse of a sale to another funder. If you’d like to complain to Gettysburg College, the literary magazine Nth Letter is giving a free submission to anyone who writes to them through Oct. 14th. Or just use the info at the link and protest, submission or not.
The Washington Post has a helpful guide to protecting your libraries from censors.
Over at the Yale Review, Alec Pollak on Lorraine Hansberry’s Queer Archives.
David Ulin, one of the smartest and kindest people in books, has a debut novel, Thirteen Question Method.
ChatGPT and Google AI training used a combined 7.3 billion gallons of water just last year and is set to go up. As data centers are finding out, the water footprint of their usage is stressing local watersheds during climate change. The little questions for ChatGPT that crack people up on social media are going to cost you your own drinking water soon enough. If they haven’t already.
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Just another craft suggestion -- Spunk & Bite by Plotnik. Hilarious, informative, and full of inspiration for a reader to take advantage of when it comes to stylizing prose!
Pushing back in the corporate salt mines against the use of AI -- for what? between the product not being great, and having seen what machine translation (early AI) did to the translator market -- well. Nope.
However, I am a tiny cog and only here for one more year, so it's fairly futile. But trying.