As part of their collaboration with the fiction editors at Five Chapters, the folks at Salon posted a story from A Guide to Being Born, the new collection by Millions contributor Ramona Ausubel.
Talk about built-in irony: the class of tricky words known as “contronyms” can mean the opposite of what you think they mean.
At Salon, Bird by Bird author Anne Lamott recounts her year in the online dating world, a year which she says was complicated by the fact that “91 percent of men snore loudly.”
But the truth is, there’s a reason most well-known writers still teach English. There’s a reason most authors drive dented cars. There’s a reason most writers have bad teeth. It’s not because we’ve chosen a life of poverty. It’s that poverty has chosen our profession.
Theoretically, it pays to get a novel on Amazon’s best seller list. In reality, though, a bestselling novel doesn’t make as much in cold hard cash as you’d think.
I would argue that decent books coverage in a daily newspaper — especially when it’s presented in such a way that readers are likely to stumble over it and discover titles they might not otherwise have heard of — is more supportive of writers in the long run than a scholarship program.
At Salon, Laura Miller explores literary culture and the downsides of the MFA, which include teaching high school.
It’s famously easy to get scammed on OkCupid. Sarah Hepola knew as much when she joined. But when someone who claimed to be Joseph Gordon-Levitt sent her a flirty message, she figured… what could she do?
Philip Roth: A eulogy for a living man
“At 79, Roth is the celebrated author of 31 books (all of them impressive, many of them masterpieces), the winner of just about every major literary award but the Nobel, and though he has remained remarkably prolific, his four most recent novels have been brief, spare, and uncharacteristically quiet; reading them, one has the sense of looking through a camera as the aperture slowly contracts.”
Our own Panio Gianopoulos with a beautiful essay on Philip Roth’s declaration of retirement over at Salon. (And hey, there’s still a little time to get a signed first-edition of A Familiar Beast!)
At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir ties Lincoln to this year’s election.
Cool thing: Kyle Minor will review audiobooks for Salon.
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