“I worked the night shift for a dating/matchmaking service before it was done by computers. Had to go to the homes and apartments of depressed and lonely people who called at 2 in the morning and wanted to find out how to meet a mate. Had to keep calling in to the main office so they knew I hadn’t been ravaged. Never would tell me if they actually had matches for the women. I didn’t interview any men that would have been dateworthy. Quit as soon as I sold a short story.”
“Singing birthday/anniversary/congratulation tunes to total strangers in a gorilla suit. (The only way it could have been worse was if they’d made me wear the Tarzan loincloth, but I didn’t have the abs for it.)”
Satan Is a Huge Asshole…Literally!, Analyze That, and Jews Ruin Parties, aka Dante’s The Inferno, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Sun Also Rises, brought to you by Better Book Titles.
Aaaaand because the week is almost over, hipster dinosaurs: Read more »
Ships that pass is a Tumblr of “fake, imagined, and literary missed connections posted to Craigslist and then re-posted here with real and actual responses to fake, imagined, and literary missed connections.”
An interesting note on who reads bestsellers from The Rumpus:
“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”
Every time his Photoshop crashes, filmmaker/developer Garrett Murray emails an original (and bitter) piece of flash fiction to the company instead of a crash report, spawning a genre which Mediabistro has dubbed “crash report fiction.”
The Great Gatsby: classic novel and video game. I’m embarrassed to say I’m geeking out about this:
Join Nick Carraway as you explore the mansions and bungalows of Long Island, the parlors of New York City, and the heart and soul of the Roaring Twenties. Attend extravagant parties and lush gatherings as you dance the Charleston with a happy couple harboring scintillating secrets. Sip bootleg gin with a mysterious millionaire desperate to bring the passions of the past into the present in Great Gatsby, a fun Hidden Object game.
Aaaand to get you through the rest of the week, here is the Old Spice Guy (or someone who looks a lot like him, anyway) promoting libraries: Read more »
The smallest literary magazine ever? Matchbook Story is a lit mag published inside, you guessed it, a book of matches, with only enough room for a 300-character story.
