Literature
Esther Eze and
Literature
To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body... See more
Who Killed Creative Writing?
Alina Stefanescu's personal library of writing, essays, literary criticism.
books are thick letters to friends
A Reader’s Manifesto - Open The Magazine
“The writing of the pose is the literary product of the MFA system and of Instagram in equal measure—it brings writing into the ordinary grueling business of the curation of the self which dominates advanced capitalist culture today.”
GD Dess • On the Cult of Craftism
The inhabitants of /lit/ see themselves as the victim of anti-canon efforts, as the academy has sought to “decolonise” and expand the curriculum over the past decade. And /lit/’s reaction is hardly unreasonable: there’s a difference between great books (well-written, perhaps undiscovered) and Great Books, which stay in the accepted canon because... See more
How 4chan became the home of the elite reader
"Prose-forward,” though, goes a long way toward explaining what books are counted as literary in the real world. Not just as a term that explains what unites the surrealism of Donald Barthelme, the Kmart realism of Ann Beattie, the lush prose of Toni Morrison, and [insert infinite other examples here]. But also what genre authors are counted among... See more
Lincoln Michel • On "Prose-Forward" Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations
“As an artist, she is totally and utterly informed by writers like Arthur Rimbaud, Allen Ginsberg, Albert Camus and countless others who inspired a young Smith to leave her hometown and seek out a poetic lifestyle. Whether she’s referencing her seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of classic works, drawing links to the beat generation she caught the tail end of, or even reworking her own poetry into song, almost every Patti Smith song has a connection to literature somewhere. “
Literary texts tend to distort the linearity of narrative sequence, and to reproduce the coexistence and simultaneity of interiorized events that resist conventional linear chronology. The narrative thread unravels freely between past and present, between different temporal planes, combining high and low registers, erudite literary references,... See more