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THE NOVEMBER NOW
WE LIVE AND DIE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
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Art: Kathy Taslitz, Constant Craving
Part of a show at the Annenberg Community Beach House
It's mostly book reviews this month, and a couple of interviews. No essays or fiction. Phew?
On the blog, I started keeping track of all the work I do as a freelancer. I'm sure the weekly posts are going to get annoying to readers, but they are definitely helping me. I work hard, and having regularly updated proof of that is helpful. Otherwise I'd be beating myself up a lot with the assumption that I don't do enough.
For the Rumpus, I interviewed Daisy Johnson, who is the youngest person ever nominated for the Booker Prize. She was game with my questions, and I've been told it's a good interview.
This month's Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like) was with Matt Lubchansky, of whom I am a HUGE admirer. The interview was nice and brief, for once; in general, I love that those interviews tend to run long, but it was also good to have one run short.
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Recent Book Reviews:
- For the Times Literary Supplement (!), There There by Tommy Orange. There's a subscriber wall, but you can read the first paragraph. Working with the TLS was wonderful and speedy and a highly giddy experience.
- For the Houston Chronicle (!), Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism by Omise'eke Tinsley. I sent a dozen pitches for this book all over the place, some of them to small, no-pay outlets, and the review ended up in this large, well-paying outlet. Funny old world, ain't it?
- For Locus, a full review of The Rending and the Nest by Kaethe Schwehn and a short review of Moon Brow by Shahriar Mandanipour. I loved the first (beautiful and surprising) and deeply disliked the second (sexist and annoying).
- For Pleiades, a three-minute book review of a chapbook from PANK, After the Death of Shostakovich Père by Maya Sonenberg. Great fun to write a review like this, in short, specific form. It's the first of two that I've filed for them, and I hope the first of many whatever-length reviews I'll do for them.
- For Western Humanities Review, The Making Sense of Things by George Choundas. One of the tiny handful of books by straight white men I reviewed this year and it was extremely good.
- For sinkhole - I forgot to share my review of So Many Islands, a phenomenal mixed-form anthology, from early October. I keep finding more and more reasons to recommend this book.
- Also for sinkhole, Notes from No Man's Land by Eula Biss, an extraordinary book of essays. We are very lucky to have Biss writing in America right now.
- For the Arts Fuse, Love in the New Millennium by Can Xue, an utterly frustrating novel that I am willing to be wrong about (Xue is apparently on the Nobel longlist) but don't think I am.
- For the Bind, [It] Incandescent by Amy Pence. Inspired by the book, I went hybrid for the review and had a terrific time writing it. I really hope I did justice to this intense and thoughtful book. (The review appeared in late September and I accidentally left it out of that month's Digest.)
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What I'm thinking about:
- I wrote and have been sitting on an opinion piece about freelancing that I can't decide whether to post or not. It's going to be controversial, which, you know, is good and bad.
- This extremely helpful listicle is full of advice about the first year of having a book published with a small press. Some of this I intuited, but none of it I knew for sure. Great stuff.
- Highly recommend this well-made piece about the Gothic. I love the Gothic, and it makes me so happy to see a defense of it.
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What I'm reading:
- Work Clean by Dan Charnas. I bet every chef who reads this is pretty mad that he stole their M.O., but it's a cool book, and helpful for anyone trying to build a work strategy from scratch.
- Frail Sister by Karen Green. Green is an artist and writer. She's also David Foster Wallace's widow; although I bought her first book, Bough Down, for that reason, I quickly found that she was an extraordinary artist in her own right. Frail Sister delivers on Bough Down's promise.
- Icelandic and Greenlandic books. I am one lucky lady that my job's helped me get familiar with today's Nordic lit. It's...lit.
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Upcoming:
- Amazingly, a short story in ebook form from the Wild Rose Press. I signed the contract yesterday.
- Reviews of poetry for Anomaly and VIDA.
- A bunch of interesting fiction reviews for January - British, American, French; novels, short stories, hybrid work.
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Recently on the Fictator:
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