“Such are the perfections of fiction...Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness...There is more profit in an hour’s talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said 'Help me,' he’d hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry.” – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things


Thursday, July 22, 2010

Literary Links and The Big Issue Launch




Last night, I read at the launch of the The Big Issue's Fiction Edition; Shane Maloney delivered a wonderfully wry launch speech, in which he also offered me a free piece of literary advice: 'Emmett, tuck your shirt in.' 

Sam Rutter also read a brilliant short story, and fun was had by all (or at least me). I'm extremely happy to be involved with the issue, which, incredibly, has a readership of over 150,000 (those of you who know anything about magazine metrics, know that readership is distinct from actual purchases; apochryphally, The New York Times claims a readership that is double to its sales, based on the argument that every edition is actually read by at least two people, and I worked for a magazine that claimed a readership four times the size of its print run. I'm not saying these figures aren't right (I'm sure they are!), but just thought I'd clarify the term 'readership').

Anyway, I've read some really great/interesting articles online over the last week, and (because I am too lazy to write a real post) thought I might list a few of them:

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