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 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.
The longest novels of all time, summarized in 140 characters or less.
Can poetry deter kleptomaniacs?
If you’re a writer, avoid these professions for your day job.
Unexpected literary references in “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” “The Simpsons,” “South Park,” “Looney Tunes,” and other animated TV shows, via.
You’re never too old to start writing. Case in point: an 82-year-old woman has just landed a 3-book deal this week. Take that, infamous “20 under 40″ list.
Here are some stories The Rumpus’s Seth Fischer likes. I like them too.
Image: Bruce Willey.
 A Twollo To say that Twitter has become pretty pervasive is an understatement. All sorts of people have Twitter handles (this blog included — @litdrift) and in response a whole slew of custom-built applications have sprung up to cater to the masses. To me, these services should be judged not on how innovative they are, or how they enhance the Twitter experience or any of that baloney. Instead, they should strictly be ranked by how clever their names are. Here are a few applications that have risen to the challenge and selected monikers that 1) stick to the avian theme that Twitter has cultivated or 2) incorporate some delicious wordplay. Read more »
A visualization of some odd writer rituals from Lapham’s Quarterly. Victor Hugo wrote naked in the bedroom, Emily Dickinson wrote poetry in the pantry, John Cheever wrote in his underwear in the basement. Lots of nude or semi-nude writing going on, I can see.
A pre-Catcher Salinger writes to Hemingway.
“He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.” This and more best metaphors ever, via.
In this week’s edition of Life’s Not Fair, Jersey Shore castmates JWOWW and Ronnie have landed a book deal.
How to become a literary star.
5 “wonderfully weird” book videos to add to the list.
What do David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Wikipedia have in common? Via.
James Franco edited by the New York Tyrant.
Robot Rilke, via.
Snarkmarket’s Robin Sloan writes a piece of flash fiction with near real-time editing help from Twitter.
The problem with fairy tales.
Aaaand because it’s hump day, here is a plastic bag with the voice of Werner Herzog: Read more »
Whether or not Twitter remains a popular tool or a passing phase, it is still a useful instrument for writers to use to connect with their fans, record passing thoughts, and try out new material. Below is a list of five writers who surely would have made good use of the social media tool if given the chance, and here’s what they might be Tweeting.
Charles Dickens: Freelance writers in this day and age use Twitter to drive readers to their work. Very quick to realize the opportunities and the audiences created by new media, Dickens would surely overtweet. But his dedication to his fans would keep his feed interesting.
“@bookbench pls tell yr readers to keep their fingers crossed for the fate of little Nell and DM me with any concerns regarding her outcome”
Jonathan Swift: Read more »
Kurt Vonnegut draws some graphs to explain how fiction works, via.
Six simple tips for writing a literary manifesto.
Talk about finding a silver lining: Bad Review Cliche Bingo.
Edit other people’s sentences for fun with oddly addicting Bite-Sized Edits, via.
Author photo failures.
Buzzfeed co-founder Jonah Peretti has a choose-your-own-adventure Twitter, and Mediabistro is lauding him for “[breaking] new ground in Twitter Lit.” Which isn’t really true, as the ground has already been broken, but Peretti’s project is cool anyway.
Fiction advice from ad guys.
A French experiment modeled after the Milgram experiments found that people would kill, literally, to be on TV.
Aaaaand because I love you, and also zombies, I would like to share with you this: will you survive a zombie apocalypse, the flowchart. Read more »
Twitter is not especially well-known for fiction. But maybe that will change. Writers are embracing Twitter for the creative challenge imposed by its 140-character limit, for its real-time functionality, and for its interactivity. Twitterature, or Twiction, or whatever else you’d like to call it, is not just a means of reaching today’s ADD-raddled reader–it’s a new medium entirely, spawning new ways to create and interact with fiction.
So without further ado, here’s a short guide to try innovative and interesting Twitter fiction projects, past and present:
 Electric Literature’s highly anticipated “microserialization” of Rick Moody’s novel begins today, and is definitely worth a read. Rather than chopping up a pre-written story into 140-character bursts as many other Twitter novelists tend to do, Moody wrote his novel Some Contemporary Characters expressly for Twitter and embraced the character limit as a source of creative inspiration. Each section of the novel comes every 10 minutes and lasts until December 2nd.
 Last Bloomsday, two Ulysses enthusiasts took the novel’s 10th chapter, Wandering Rocks, and retraced all the events of that day on Twitter. Videogame designers Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy registered 54 of the novel’s characters as Twitter users, who all Tweeted about what they were doing on June 16, 1904 at the correct fictional times. (Old project, since June 16 is long past at this point, but still worth a read. Here’s hoping Bogost and McCarthy will revive the project in some way next Bloomsday.)
Read more »
 This is your brain on books.
Jane Austen’s Emma comes to the big screen…in Bollywood. I am very excited to see Emma and Mr. Knightley dance and sing. For reals.
O helo thar: a good old fashioned book burnin’ at a Baptist Church in North Carolina. Books to be burned include such “heretical works” as Rick Warren, Mother Theresa, and, uh, the Bible. Book burning: ur doin it rong.
Maurice Sendak says he does “not tolerate” the opinion that Where the Wild Things Are is too scary for children, and concerned parents should “go to hell.”
The question is asked, again: is Twitter ruining literacy? We say, again: nope.
Boys like zombies because they’re both “dumb, brutal, ugly, and mindlessly violent.” Girls like vampires because they’re a proxy for the gay men they secretly want to date. Okay.
Read more »
My roommate is obsessed with Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods, Stardust, and Coraline. He got really pissed when I confused Gaiman with yet another Neil, Neil Stephenson, author of Snowcrash (the favorite book of all my nerdy and punky friends in high school).
I apologized but didn’t take it to heart because I didn’t think Gaiman was all that big of a deal — not enough, at least, to warrant my roommate’s obsession.
I was wrong, apparently.
Sci-fi nerds on the internet are super excited this month because Gaiman partnered with the BBC to run an experiment in creative fiction — on Twitter. We’ve written about Twitter fiction before (here, here, and here), but this is different. Gaiman tweeted the first sentence of a story, and then readers and Twitter users make up continuations to the story by tweeting under the hashtag #bbcawdio. Read more »
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