Month: January 2019

Books Are Horrifying

At least, I wish more were. In trying to decide what to write about for the latest Slushpile, I pored over Best Of lists (still going strong on the cusp of February!), Top 10s, Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine picks, and the picks of those whom Reese Witherspoon picked for Hello Sunshine. I am all for…

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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

In my mind, no writer and illustrator were better paired than Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell. Go ahead, ask a Gen X’er: “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” and its sequels were more terrifying than “Nightmare on Elm Street” or even some of the creepiest “Little House on the Prairie” episodes. (You’ll have to…

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Blind Faith: A Murder That Didn’t Add Up

Back when Rolling Stone was in magazine form, c. 1988, I bought a copy because it had Guns N? Roses on the cover. Oh God, I loved them. But aside from interviews with Slash and Axl and probably talk of that ?November Rain? song, there was also an excerpt of an upcoming book “Blind Faith”…

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Kristen Roupenian Is Not Cat Person

As an apt follow-up to both my previous post about a writing career’s sure path to poverty, as well an earlier post about how an unknown writer’s first short story in the New Yorker led to a seven-figure deal with an S&S imprint, comes “What It Felt Like When ‘Cat Person’ Went Viral,” by Kristen…

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NYT: Writers Will Now Starve to Death, Die

Unless they’re Ernest Hemingway. In this edition of “Why did I major in English?” or, “Why did I go to a liberal arts college?” The New York Times‘ Concepci?n de Le?n presents us with this bit of news: “‘In the 20th century, a good literary writer could earn a middle-class living just writing,’ said Mary…

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