Monday
She’s drawn for the NYT, McSweeneys, Vanity Fair and now you? Lisa Hanawalt launches My Dirty Dumb Eyes at PowerHouse Arena from 7.

Tuesday
Rad ladies celebrate a rad lady: Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Eileen Myles, Lynne Tillman and Katha Pollit gather round Muriel Rukeyeser’s previously unpublished book Savage Coast. McNally J from 7.

What does it mean to be “intersex”? Find out when Abigail Tarttelin reads from her novel Golden Boy at PowerHouse Arena from 7. 

Have you not caught the Claire Vaye Watkins & Ramona Ausubel show? Now is the time: Book Court from 7.

Wednesday
Mixer Reading Series gets mixy with readers Melissa Febos, Ioanna Opidee, Jessica Lillien, Leah Schnelbach, Joshua Lazarus and John Fenlon Hogan chez Cakeshop from 8.

Your debut was like wow: Ayana Mathis, whose book The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was lauded by Oprah, and Paul Harding, who won the Pulitzer for Tinkers, chat it up at The Strand from 7. (Must purchase Mathis’ book or a $15 Strand gift card to attend.)

Thursday
Debut novelist Bennett Sims reads from A Questionable Shape and talks things out with our own Halimah Marcus at WORD from 7.

Films based on short stories about writers (plus poetry)? Go down this literary rabbit hole with The Brooklyn Rail at McNally J from 7.

***

—Erika Anderson is one-half of The Outlet’s editorial team. (The other half is here.)

I remember reading some article, shortly before I began my MFA program—I think it was in Poets & Writers—which talked about how writers have this reputation of being crazy and drunk. The author of the article was saying her grad program was the opposite—that they all stayed in during the weekends and wore braces at the keyboard to prevent carpal tunnel.

I’ve heard that it’s fairly common for people to find it difficult to write the first year or two after graduating from writer school. Some of us don’t do it often, and when we do, it often comes hard. Some of us stop doing it at all. Personally? I wrote two stories the year after I graduated. The longer of the two was three pages.

When I moved back home last June, it was still difficult to write. I heard voices in my head at the keyboard, telling me I hadn’t paid enough attention to the language, that this character hadn’t changed enough, and I shouldn’t use second person, present tense, adverbs, or too many adjectives. It was painful to write because I couldn’t stop following the rules.

***

Ever since I was very small, I’ve had this problem where I felt like my emotions were overwhelming me, so much so that sometimes all I could think about was my need to contain them. Ever since I was I was very small, I’ve had this problem where I felt like I didn’t fit in, couldn’t figure out the rules, and all this was something I needed to hide.

This led to me judging myself, which led to me harming myself in basically every way possible: suicide attempts, self-mutilation, placing myself in dangerous situations with dangerous people, general recklessness, depriving myself of sleep and food, taking on too much, taking on too little, being a shitty person to those I loved, drugs, booze, drugs, booze, more drugs – I could increase the list ad infinitum. In the end, the actions I took to suppress the feelings led to numbness, and numbness is the worst feeling of all.

And then I got sober and the numbness wore off, but the judgment stuck around a little longer, sloughing itself off slowly. When I was in the outpatient mental hospital, after my “breakdown” in January, I was introduced to Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which focuses on acknowledging your emotions and not judging them (among other things). While in therapy there I heard: Yes, you are different. Yes, you do indeed have “more” emotions than most. But all of this is just fine. In fact, all of this is an asset.

All of this is fine. I’m fine. I’m allowed to burn on like a motherfucker, and that is totally fine. Learning this was, as a therapist would say, a breakthrough.

***

This one Flaubert quote keeps coming up in my life: at a reading, in conversation with friends, on the internet. It’s the one that says, “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so you may be violent and original in your work.”

Well, if that isn’t an enormous dump of bullshit. Isn’t that a nice excuse to live a boring life.

If we, as writers, are the nerve endings of society; if the only people for us are the mad ones; if prose is the autobiography of ardor; if the only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest and how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated; if the only way to fail at life is to abstain – then how the fuck are we supposed to do this by following rules, by suppressing emotion, by typing and living in neat little boxes, by being regular and orderly in our lives?

I’m really curious to know what those carpal tunnel brace wearers’ stories read like. And I’m also curious to know if Flaubert was even serious when he wrote that.

***

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my realization that following the writing rules is bullshit coincided with my acceptance of my own undeniable craziness, which coincided with me liking my writing again.

There is, of course, a fine line between living a life of ardor and setting one’s dial to self-destruct. There is a balance between living a life of violent originality and sequestering oneself to boxes built of rules containing keyboards. We can’t burn ourselves out. We can’t spend so much time living that we never sit down to write.

When I first got sober, I was terrified that I’d become normal. But I discovered something interesting: you actually become less normal when your weirdness is no longer tempered by long nights closing down bars and/or getting stupidly high, because by doing these things you become predictable. At first, this unbridled weirdness manifested in finding new ways of imploding my life, but as I became more experienced in being sober, in being healthy and happy, it slowly began to mean finding a more careful way to punch my fist through the wall.

I’ve developed a personal code for living a life of violent originality in a way that doesn’t harm anyone, and this is what it looks like:

—Say ‘yes’ to any opportunity given to you, even if it seems impractical or stupid. Especially if it seems impractical or stupid. Stupid decisions are sometimes the best ones – it is only required that you make these stupid decisions carefully.
—Find ways to write, even if it involves regularly staying up till 6am.
—If something makes you uncomfortable, it means you should probably do it.
—Allow yourself to fall in love with people who are not the best for you on paper if something quiet whispers that doing so would be the best for your heart.
—Live with your mom, yes, when you’re thirty, if doing so allows you to focus on what’s important and repair all the wrongs you’ve done to her.
—Don’t make a back-up plan. Back-up plans are for orderly, regular little bitches.
—Do occasionally blow important things off to do things of “lesser importance,” especially if these lesser things are things like going for a walk in the canyon when the day is clear and the light in that hour is golden, or eating something greasy and fattening with your forever best friend.
—Go to work, and teach those students with your heart bursting through.

But here is the most important part of all:

—Slow the fuck down.

This might seem counterintuitive to living a life out of ardor, but it’s not. The glorious moments in life— the ones that you will remember, that you will write about—will pass you by if you don’t cling on to them with ferocity. Recognizing these moments and drinking them in is the best way to grab life by the throat.

When life overwhelms you—because it will overwhelm you—let it overwhelm you and then take some deep breaths. When life breaks your heart—because it will break your heart—let yourself cry. When life angers you—because it will anger you—allow yourself to feel that burn, allow your heart to pound, allow your whole body to shake, and know that the pain will soon go away. Because it will go away.

The woman at work, the one who just annoyed you by doing her job and telling you what to do—well, she is like you, and she is also in pain, because she is human. Talk to her. Your father loves you, no matter what you do, so call him. Your friend is your friend, your lover is your lover, because of your flaws, not despite them, so love them, and, more importantly, let them love you. Go down to the beach and watch the sunset. Go dance, and sing, even though and especially because you suck at it. If you meet someone new and they interest you, get them to be your friend. Do something nice for someone just because you can, even if it eats into your “you” time. If you read something you like, send the writer an e-mail and tell them you like it. Go play with your dog. Lose track of time while reading a book. Do things like sit on your patio for hours with only a pack of cigarettes and your headphones, because music is one of the best ways to feel things while sitting still. And for god’s sake, don’t second guess yourself and wonder if you sound like an inspirational poster—because we all need an inspirational poster every now and then. You need to slow the fuck down and take a good look at life and the world you’re living in, because if you drive on the freeway at night and look at the lights in the right way, they will seem like stars.

PREVIOUSLY: Letter #1: Leaving the City I Love / Letter #2: I have feelings for you, Cat Marnell / Letter #3: I’m a Writer and I’m Better Than You / Letter #4: Why I Write Fiction / Letter #5: Supernatural Bread

***

—Juliet Escoria writes things in California, and is just about finished with her first book. E-stalk her here.

We had cause for great celebration: The Paris Review guest editedRecommended Reading, bequeathing unto us the insight that “Most people have had anal sex. Don’t look so surprised.”

We learned that E. E. Cummings was literally the first person to party.

The Awl gave us advice on how to stay friends with struggling writers.

The Daily News revealed that book clubs can be fun. And topless.

Juliet Escoria gave us tips on living like a writer and how to carefully put your fist through a wall.

If you’re in Brooklyn this weekend, keep the party going with Lit Crawl on Saturday and a marathon poetry reading for the Brooklyn Bridge’s birthday on Sunday.

If you’re not in Brooklyn, bring the party with you with an Electric Literature flask.

***

–Benjamin Samuel  is the co-editor of Electric Literature. The last time he partied like a writer, he woke up with the taste of tweed in his mouth. Find him on Twitter.

“Using ‘wicked’ as a term of approval” was first recorded in Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, said Churchwell. And the act of partying (as a verb) was first used by E. E. Cummings in a 1920 letter describing how he’d “partied” in Paris.

“To say ‘We partied last night and it was wicked,’ we might think of as a very modern way of putting something, but in fact it is a way they could have put it in 1920,” said Churchwell.

General misbehavior and lawlessness (ie “partying”) also became the norm during the prohibition, and “a kind of bohemianism that goes mainstream for the first time.”

Inspired by the amount of drinking and the ways to talk about it, Edmund Wilson, a critic and a friend of Fitzgerald, compiled the Lexicon of Prohibition, a hierarchical list of then contemporary words to describe being drunk. The list includes “jazzed” and “edged,” and words like “embalmed” or “buried” came into play if you were dead drunk.

While you can’t go to a wicked party with Cummings and Fitzgerald, since they’re literally already “embalmed,” you can still get “squiffy” prohibition style. Go get lit with a flask from Electric Literature!

***

– Benjamin Samuel is the co-editor of Electric Literature. He is also occasionally a shill, willing to endorse swilling with the aid of EL’s fine, branded merchandise. Find him on Twitter.

Monday
Karen Russell, Elissa Schappel, Leigh Newman, Roxane Gay, and Michael Held confirm Brooklyn’s reputation as a literary mecca with the return of the Franklin Park Reading Series. Make your pilgrimage to Franklin Park by 8 pm, much earlier if you want a place to sit.

Tuesday
Our own Halimah Marcus joins Rob Spillman, Michael Shapiro, Noah Rosenberg, Cynthia-Marie O’Brien, and Syreeta McFadden for a discussion of publishing in the digital age. Drinks and innovation at KGB Bar at 7 pm.

New York’s newest (and the world’s most important) non-fiction reading series returns with David Rees, Dan Wilbur, and Ashley Cardiff. 2A at 7 pm.

Wednesday
David Foster Wallace Appreciation Society. What more needs to be said but: WORD Brooklyn at 7 pm.

Emerging writers in Crown Heights, i.e. everyone in Crown Heights, read at the Renegade Reading Series at Launchpad circa 8pm.

Thursday
Get back to WORD for a PEN reading featuring Ben Greenman, Leigh Newman, Jennifer Gilmore, Jonathan Dee, and Joan Silber. WORD at 7 pm.

Cormac McBootay (Lincoln Michel) and DJ HemingYeh (James Yeh) put the nail in Pandora’s coffin with a night of music that doesn’t suck. Manhattan Inn at 11 pm.

Friday
Brooklynites launch a new issue of Psychiana and promise “drinks, dancing, aura readings, invisible activities” and more. Sold. Signal at 8 pm.

Saturday
Get litty in Brooklyn during Lit Crawl’s tour of Brooklyn’s best bars and magazines. Various locations at 5 pm.

Some stories set in New York seem so instantly familiar that they might as well be their own genre, as rigidly coded as the western, or the Gothic horror tale. You know the New York story I’m talking about: jaded but immature youngsters want to be artists, care very deeply about seeming to care very deeply about exhibits and plays, and date one another neurotically—all presented in a satirical tone.

Iris Smyles’s Iris Has Free Time follows a young woman named Iris through her 20s as she does many of the things one expects a 20-something-year-old New Yorker to do in a novel like this: she adapts to college life—roommate, academics, the city; she interns at The New Yorker; she works on an autobiographical novel and hunts half-heartedly for a “real” job; she dates a slew of eccentric, self-centered guys; she attends a “humanities” graduate program and teaches freshmen; she starts a literary journal, blogs, and writes a sex column; she travels to Europe with a boyfriend. And she drinks, and drinks, and drinks.

Iris Has Free Time is a shaggy dog story, in accordance with Iris’s wish to live “plotlessly.” No one conflict overarches this novel; instead, Smyles constructs a portrait of youth by focusing on smaller moments—“stories of tragic dailyness,” as the narrator might put it.

That aforementioned narrator is Iris herself, who tells her story in alternating tones—sometimes cynical and snotty, sometimes yearning and vulnerable—while dropping references to cultural detrita both high and low, ranging from The Odyssey and Rebecca to Sex and the City and The Real World. Smyles takes the novel’s epigraph not from Dante, but from “Spark Notes: Dante’s Inferno”—literary, but irreverently so.

I don’t really need to tell you anything else, do I? You already know whether you’ll like this book. No doubt you have noticed that the author and the narrator have the same name, thus the novel surely leans toward metafictive autobiography; is that all right with you? Do you watch Girls and relate? Do you enjoy the occasional Sloane Crosley essay? If “yes,” then this blurb from Annie Hall herself, Diane Keaton, says everything you need to know: “You will love this book.”

Boy oh boy, did I try to resist Iris Has Free Time. In my defense, the prologue drags a bit (with the exception of an absurd visit to a job fair, at which Iris arm-wrestles “The Maxim Man”), and Smyles indulges in a few too many clichés of the contemporary bildungsroman. But eventually—goddamn it—the book began to charm me in ways I hadn’t expected.

Iris Has Free Time convinces in its details, especially throughout the section that covers Iris’s time in a graduate program, where there are copies of AWP Magazine everywhere. When teaching, Iris asks her freshmen students to “grade themselves” at the end of the semester. As a writer, Iris mostly just moves around punctuation, as though crafting a short story is like solving a sliding puzzle. At one point, Iris goes on a date with a writer who is famous for his memoirs about his own alcoholism; at the memoirist’s suggestion, they meet for drinks. The novel understands the silliness of its literary/academic subjects very well.

Most of the supporting characters who orbit Iris are fascinating: a character named The Captain has just sued a 90s TV star for relatively picayune reasons; a character named Felix is first shown smoking a joint and watching Soul Train one morning in an apartment that isn’t his, and at which he didn’t necessarily have permission to crash. Smyles has a real knack for establishing characters quickly with one or two off-kilter details. Even most of those bildungsroman clichés I mentioned before are twisted in surprising ways (Iris’s trip to Europe, which would lead to an epiphany in most novels, climaxes with an embarrassing incident of sloshed urination).

Iris Has Free Time never settles into a consistent style, and each portion has its own narrative logic. Some sections—like a brief chapter involving the sexual uses of Chinese finger cuffs—read like perfect short stories.

Even as the book refuses to fall into conventional narrative patterns, a couple of strong emotional anchors keep it from floating into abstraction—primarily, Iris’s understated battle with her drinking problem, and her friendship with her college roommate, May. By the end of the book, Iris and May are in their late 20s, and one of them is engaged, while the other is finally reading Swann’s Way. “My missed opportunities were still ahead,” remarks Iris, thinking back on her early 20s. They seem to have grown up.

But Smyles’s tacit question, which hides in her acknowledgement of adulthood’s bittersweet nature, is this: Are missed opportunities always still ahead? And if so, should this fact frighten, or amuse? “I think I might be depressed,” Iris muses. “Either that or I’m very happy. It’s hard to tell.” I felt this way in the end, leaving me with the sensation that Iris Has Free Time is really a book about me. And, like Iris, I totally enjoy stuff about me—even if at first I pretend not to.

Recommended if you enjoyed: Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

***

—Benjamin Rybeck’s reviews have also appeared in V Magazine. His fiction has received “special mention” and “notable reading” distinctions from The Pushcart Prize Anthology and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, respectively.

As its title indicates, Idiopathy is about what bloody idiots people are. While delivering one laugh-out-loud zinger after another (many of them too raunchy to be quoted here), Byers lampoons, with excoriating wit, the hash we have made of modern life, and the hash it has made of us.

In the English city of Norwich—which may bring to mind Slough from the UK version of The Office—Katherine, Daniel and Nathan compulsively reject the promises of potential intimacy that keep rearing up between them. Meanwhile, Bovine Idiopathic Entrancement Syndrome is spreading through Britain’s cattle population. The cows now stare, motionless, into space; and halfway through the book, the disease has spread to sheep. The implication being, we’re next.

The novel is a triple portrait, told in smoothly rotating points of view. Daniel and Katherine are ex-lovers who fight ceaselessly and viciously. Nathan, their erstwhile drug dealer, used to provide a point of triangulation for them. Now that Nathan, newly sober, is out of rehab, their old dynamic doesn’t hold, but none of them can walk away.

Katherine is having a brutishly impersonal sexual relationship, of which Byers probes every embarrassing corner with surprising insight and humor. When an accidental pregnancy threatens to breach her defensive fortress of rage, she implodes. Eaten alive by bitterness, Katherine is a tricky character to pull off. Like a friend who begins, “You know what your problem is?” and then actually speaks the awful truth, she is part avenging angel, part monster.

For Daniel, rule-bound and incapable of spontaneity, there is only one directive: behave properly. To always behave “properly” is to be false; but to be sincere, one must take risks, and Daniel will risk nothing. Pinned in place by paralyzing cowardice, his life with his cloyingly sweet girlfriend Angelica holds no real pleasure save that of accumulating stuff. “Lacking children as they did,” Byers writes, “Daniel and Angelica needed something to tend to or they risked falling into the kind of vapid complacency they both professed to fear but also secretly craved.” Bovine entrancement, indeed.

Nathan is getting back on his feet at his parents’ house—awkward, since his mother is busily promoting her blockbuster book Mother Courage: One Woman’s Battle Against Maternal Blame (with the help of Dr. Dave, personal development guru and author of C.H.A.N.G.E: Calling a Halt to All Negative and Gloomy Experiences). While his mother could be seen as the current face of British parenting, his father, rigid to the point of calcification, seems to represent an older tradition: “He was like an ocean liner: a change of mind was painfully slow and required a complex pattern of braking and turning before thrust could be reapplied.” Like so many lines in the novel, it elicits first a laugh, then heartbreak.

Through Nathan’s eyes, we come to grips with what it means to acclimatize to society. Familiar surroundings, like the supermarket, are tinged with existential horror when looked at anew. “People ate as they roamed the shop. When their children started to cry, they encouraged them to eat. On every aisle there was at least one child sobbing gutturally through the wilting remains of a Snickers.”

Of the three, only Nathan appears not ruled by self-interest; in fact he attempted to destroy his old self at a rave during which he mutilated his body. But as his humanity filters back to him, so too does its dark side. His first impulse of individuation is to steal parents’ credit card, in order to purchase his mother’s specious books and then throw them in the river. Later, the possibility of intimacy with Katherine provides incentive to let himself slide.

This brings up the issue of whether Byers has written a searing exploration of the engines that drive self-destruction, or merely a funny, pointed satire. In laying bare his character’s worst qualities, there are times when he seems to be implementing a scorched-earth policy. We spend so much time exploring his characters’ delusions, we barely get a sense of where their essential goodness—if they have any—might lie. On the other hand, it’s not an author’s job to make us comfortable, and it is clear that Byers is writing from the heart. If he struggles to have faith in our collective kernel of human good, he clearly still trusts in that most human of gifts: gallows humor. And in his deft hands, it is certainly a gift.

Idiopathy will be released in the U.S. on June 4, 2013.

Recommended if you enjoyed: Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis, Great Apes by Will Self, England, England by Julian Barnes

***

—Jenna Leigh Evans writes fiction in Brooklyn. You can find her here.

Monday, May 6

Ben Greenman launches his novel The Slippage at Franklin Park with Sam Lipsyte, Touré, Claire Vaye Watkins, Amelia Grey. You might have heard of them.

Sackett Street folks Nick Dybek, Julie Sarkissian, Amy Shearn and Jill Di Donato read to the masses at Book Court. 

Tuesday, May 7

Benjamin Percy launches Red Moon at Book Court. Boom!

Did you ever “come of age”? Then you might be into these stories by Susan Kirschabaum, Nathaniel Kressen, Paula Froelich and Anthony Haden Guest at No. 8.

Wednesday, May 8

The woman as literary critic–a discussion. Panelists Kate Bolick, Ruth Franklin, Laura Miller, Miriam Markowitz, Michelle Orange, Parul Sehgal, and Michelle Dean break it down at Housing Works.

First it’s a reading then it’s a party: Noon reading with Brandon Hobson, Noy Holland, Lincoln Michel, Christine Schutt and James Yeh. Center for Fiction.

Thursday, May 9

Literary Death Match finally comes to Brooklyn. Judges: Baratunde Thurston, Elissa Bassist, Dale Seever. Readers: Tayari Jones, Alina Simone, Alexander Chee, Dan Wilbur. Audience: You + then some. Union Hall.

Friday, May 10

How’s that adulthood thing going? Commiserate with Alida Nugent for her It Gets Worse launch at Powerhouse.

Or get silly with David Sedaris and a zillion other people, i.e. the crowd, at McNally J

***

—Erika Anderson is one-half of The Outlet’s editorial team. (The other half is here.)

Welcome back to the Critical Hit Awards for book reviews. This is a round-up, a recommended reading list, and—why not?—a terribly prestigious and coveted prize.

Our guest judge is Dan Kois, editor of the Slate Book Review.

Electric Literature: The Slate Book Review had its first birthday in March. Happy birthday!

Dan Kois: Thanks! I’m really proud of our first year. As a mode of covering books, it’s working: Traffic and conversation are both up on our books coverage as compared to pre-SBR times. Our VIDA numbers could’ve been better, though. [EL covered the VIDA count here.]

Electric Literature: If your reviews carried no identifying marks—no Slate logo, no byline—would a reader be able to guess that they came from the Slate Book Review? Should they be able to?

Dan Kois: Every review I edit contains hidden within its text the name of my daughter, Nina.

Electric Literature: ‘Critical Hit Awards’ is really just an anagram for ‘Rad Satirical Witch’. What kind of editorial balance do you try to bring to the Slate Book Review overall? Balance between what and what?

Dan Kois: I’m looking to achieve a balance between old and new books; books from big houses and books from small ones; traditional reviewy reviews and critical essays that use the book as a diving board. And I want a balance of fun books and serious books and great books and not-so-great books.

Electric Literature: You have reviewed books, movies, graphic novels, and music. There’s a guy at The Awl who reviews the weather and a guy at The Rumpus who reviews the world. Is there anything that can’t be reviewed? Anything that you would not review?

Dan Kois: I imagine anything can be reviewed. When was the last time your fellow human beings didn’t have an opinion about something?

Electric Literature: I have no opinion on that. What’s your favorite review that you published recently? What is the other publication whose reviews you most admire?

Dan Kois: I really liked Julia Turner’s handwritten review of Philip Hensher’s book on handwriting. And while I read reviews from all over the place, there’s no publication that I specifically seek out the way I rummage through the various sections of the Sunday New York Times in search of the Book Review.

Bring up the Bodies and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Reviewed by Namara Smith in n+1

As a crazed Hilary Mantel fan, I’ve read a lot of reviews of Hilary Mantel, but this piece (which is sort of about the two Cromwell novels but really about her whole career) is very smart and thoughtful about the way Mantel uses language, and has a killer kicker.

Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James 

Reviewed by Heather Havrilesky in The Baffler

Haters, take heed: As we learned in our Audio Book Club discussion, Fifty Shades of Grey is an extremely rich text, and Havrilesky’s post-capitalist critique is fascinating. My favorite takeaway: That the obvious precedent to Fifty Shades is, of course, American Psycho, and the book would have been more believable if Christian Grey were a serial killer.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

Reviewed  by Alison Lurie in The New York Review of Books

A totally great and angry– angry not at Messud, but at a world in which humans like Messud’s protagonist are created.

p.s. Ron Charles’ “Totally Hip Book Review of The Woman Upstairs” in the Washington Post is the best Dr. Elaine Showalter cameo ever!

Top of the Morning by Brian Stelter

Reviewed by Ed Bark in The New York Review of Books

Bark wasn’t completely over the moon for Brian Stelter’s book. He wrote a review which explained why, very clearly and convincingly. Stelter fans everywhere accused him of being jealous. Bark stuck to his guns. (Stelter, to his credit, was game.) This was a very solid daily-paper review that I appreciated for its willingness to go against the zeitgeist. It also has going for it that it’s completely right. Top of the Morning is not The Late Shift.

Oprah Winfrey, Book Critic

Reviewed by Jennifer Szalai in The New Yorker’s Page-Turner

Jen Szalai is one of my favorite critics, and she’s been busy this year helping out at the Times Book Review. So it’s a delight to see her byline on this engaged, open-minded piece about Oprah’s effect on the literary marketplace.

2012 Best of the Year Anthologies: SF/Fantasy

Reviewed by Paul Kincaid in the Los Angeles Review of Books

This review of two best-SF/fantasy-of-2012 anthologies isn’t a piece I would necessarily think to assign, and if I assigned it, I wouldn’t want it to come in exactly this way. But then as a reader it turned out I loved that the piece was written from completely inside the science-fiction world, and takes as granted that readers would understand what Paul Kincaid means when he notes that one story feels like “a British catastrophe story of the 1950s transposed to contemporary America.” I don’t understand, but I’m gonna go try and figure it out now! I also love that he dismisses the story by George Saunders in half a sentence.

Congratulations to our winners! You may contact Brian Hurley to claim your Field Notes prize. And thanks to Mark Molloy for nominating book reviews this month!

Read a good review lately? Nominate it for a Critical Hit Award by tweeting it at @electriclit with the hashtag #criticalhit or cast your vote in the comments section below.

***

–  Dan Kois is a senior editor at Slate, where he edits the Slate Book Review, and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

—Brian Hurley, curator of The Outlet’s Critical Hit Awards, is an editor at Fiction Advocate.

Then a man with an anti-government sign yelled out, “You were for the war in Iraq!” He held up his smartphone, “I have it right here in front of me! A war based on lies that killed a million people!”

“The only lies being told here is by you, Sir,” Rushdie said. “As president of this organization, I led this organization against that war, so you can shut the fuck up. It doesn’t matter how you shout, sir, it doesn’t make what you say correct. That is the technique of the bully throughout history—to try and shout other people down.”

With those words, and Rushdie’s cold-eyed stare hardened by assassination attempts and knighthood, the man shut the fuck up.

1. Vaddey Ratner with her book on display  2. Jamaica Kincaid reads from Paradise Lost 

Host Baratunde Thurston, author of How to Be Black, introduced a story by Nigerian writer A. Igoni Barrett’s forthcoming collection Love is Power, or Something Like That. Barrett on trying to encapsulate love with words: “You will never be able to write anything of this importance to anyone.”

Proving that lit power isn’t dependent on size, the diminutive writer, Vaddey Ratner, followed Barrett with a reading from her debut novel, In the Shadow of Banyan. Set in war-torn Cambodia, Ratner’s reading showed us a young girl’s father saying his last words before being taken away by military officers. He tells his daughter, “Do you know why I told you stories? … I told you stories to give you wings.”

1. What people look like from far away                                                      2. And from close up! 

Not quite as heartbreaking, Jamaica Kincaid fell in love with the devil when she was seven, so she read from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

Also, Earl Lovelace was once an extra commanded to die on cue: “When I was a kid, I composed my dying like a poem. There was poetry in my dying… Now here I was, a grown man, in a real movie, and I was dying like a fool—like a ass!”

Comedian and cabbie John McDonagh took it home with a poem condensing 20 years of cab driving in NYC: “New Yorkers used to yell at each other. Now they tweet! … Watch out for the red-light cameras!  Don’t go in the bus lanes! Stay out of the bike lanes! What the fuck has happened to my city!?”

Twitter. Twitter is what happened.

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–Sean Campbell lives, writes, and occasionally updates his blog in Bed-Stuy