Category Archives: Links

Twitter links

by Anna

I’m currently reading a couple of Kinsey’s recommendations, so in the meantime, I thought I’d pass along a couple literature-related twitter feeds for recommendation:

Guy In Your MFA (@GuyInYourMFA)

Profile summary: “Two re-writes away from finishing the Great American Novel. Maybe about a 20-something in Brooklyn?”

Laugh at this guy, so that you don’t kill the actual guy in your MFA (or writing group).* Also, at www.guyinyourmfa.com, if you aren’t into Twitter. He has a buzzfeed quiz on how many books by white men have you read, and for the first time, I was proud to have read as few as I had.

The Worst Muse (@WorstMuse)

Profile summary: “No, seriously, go for it. It’ll be a bestseller.”

A long and hilarious list of what not to do in your writing.

—Anna

*Or the guy just this morning holding up the line at Starbucks while he explained to the baristas that he is a Writer (emphasis his) and so really pays attention to people and conversations and cultural transitions, and used that as an excuse to inquire into all of their ethnic backgrounds in a really uncomfortable way.

Thug Notes

by Rebecca

Like Anna, I’m a bit embarrassed to make this next recommendation during Black History Month because while this is awesome and by black creators and celebrating black culture, it shouldn’t be restricted to just the one month. This isn’t just awesome within the context of black culture, it’s just plain awesome.

Thug Notes is a YouTube series of videos and it is AWESOME! And I really wish it had been available when I was in high school. These videos take classic books and, in about 5 minutes each, summarizes the plot and talks about the main literary analysis.

  • Great Expectations, which I slogged through in high school and just got entirely bogged down in the details, laid out nice and neat in 5 minutes.
  • Lord of the Flies, which I never managed to get past the first page of, broken down for me and presented.
  • Pride & Prejudice, which I have read way too many times and absolutely love, getting shown in a new light that I hadn’t noticed before.

What makes them particularly funny is that they’re all narrated by Sparky Sweets, PhD, coming at you from the Houston Rap subculture and he is keeping it real about what these homeboys of literature are up to, from a set straight out of Master Piece theater with all of its proper British overtones.

The implied culture clash is hilarious mostly because no clash is ever actually realized. As Jared Bauer, one of the creators, says:

“The idea behind Thug Notes was always that ‘the joke is that there is no joke…’ because the analysis is just so accurate and so smart.”

There are 64 of them (so far) and they are just brilliant. Go check them out!

Not Actually Fanfiction

by Rebecca

As should be obvious, I really enjoy fanfiction. They are (often) fun stories by (presumably) amateur authors who can sometimes do amazing things unconstrained by thoughts of salability. They write because they have ideas they want to get out. And sometimes, it’s not actually fanfiction. Sometimes an amateur author, in the same spirit of fanfiction, will write an original story and post it online for anyone and everyone to enjoy.

There are even a few archives specifically for these types of short stories, presented like fanfiction except for being entirely original. The parallel for Fanfiction.net is FictonPress.com. ArchiveOfOurOwn simply added a category for Original Fiction.

Here are a few recommendations for original short stories presented online:

Suite for the Living and Dead
By Inland Territory
Summary: When he was twenty three years old, Mike Lafayette took it on himself to write an oratorio for a people without a god.
Why I like it: This is just beautiful. A beautiful concept and beautifully written, but also speaks directly of the particular pain of seeing a deadly and important conflict happening in front of you and, for one reason or another, not joining the fight.
Extra comment: This feels a bit like a fanfiction story in that it references a much more epic story with main characters who are minor characters here. It makes me wonder if there is a book out there this is connected to but I haven’t been able to find. My current assumption is that it is that the author of this short story has an idea for a book and maybe she’s even half-written it, but it’s not available anywhere.

Toad Words
By Ursula Vernon
Summary: Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…
Why I like it: One of the problems with traditional fairytales that I (and many other women) are increasingly aware of is how they often reward young girls for being quiet, polite, beautiful, and awaiting rescue, while punishing young girls for being outspoken, ugly, and actively attempting their own rescue. This takes one such fairytale and shows the repercussions, and how a curse can ultimately be made a reward and a blessing can ultimately be a punishment.

Never the Same
By Polenth Blake
Genre: science fiction
No summary, but the first paragraph: Everyone thinks my brother is nice. He set up a rescue centre for birds, after the terraforming accident poisoned the lake. That’s always the image of him, holding a bird covered in sludge. The birds are never the same after they’re cleaned, but the gossips never talk about that.
Why I like it: This is a lovely little mystery, with a main character with mental health issues. With a somewhat unreliable narrator investigating a situation in a highly biased community, the story looks into the difference between right and wrong actions and right and wrong motivations.

The Emperor’s Last Concubine
By Yamanashi Moe
Warning: this has explicit sex in it
No summary, but I bookmarked it as: a story of love and politics
Why I like it: This story has the standard Cinderella structure but focuses on what happens after the handsome prince whisks his beloved away and the difficulties faced by both prince and beloved as they both become aware of the golden cage the palace makes.

Happy Halloween!

by Rebecca

Happy Halloween, dear readers!

As a bit of terrifying Halloween fun, here’s a short online comic strip for you:

Bongcheon-Dong Ghost
written and illustrated by Horang

I ran across this several years ago (the link was messaged around my classroom at the time and you could tell who had clicked on it by the flinches and stifled shrieks) but all the text was in Korean. When I went looking for it again, I found it translated into English. It remains really well done.

2-sentence horror stories

by Rebecca

In honor of approaching Halloween, I present you with some short horror stories.

The background is: about a year ago, a Reddit user asked “What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?” The response was tremendous and there are currently 3397 comments in that chain (admittedly, a lot of them are responses to the responses, so there are fewer than 3K stories, but still.)

To see nine of them, nicely formatted, go here.

To see all of them, with the original formatting, go here.

Warning: these really are terrifying. Oof. Who needs sleep anyway?

More Fun Stories…

by Anna

Rebecca and I exchanged a couple of short stories with twist endings that I thought I’d share with you to finish up this week:

I ran across this through io9, which I think I’ve recommended before, and they recommended it as not-your-normal-discontent-in-your-body story:

http://imgur.com/a/CgCaR

And, this one has a double twist ending in just a few paragraphs, the second of which is brilliantly provided in comments:

http://jaytothesun.tumblr.com/post/95881851021/hotmesswithouthehot-lemonmintcoughdrops

—Anna

A Fun Story…

by Anna

So, it’s been a week, hasn’t it? I have a treat for us all to see us into the weekend.

We occasionally link to other blogs that we have found particularly interesting, but I don’t know that we have ever linked to a specific piece of writing floating around the internet. However, Rebecca sent me this link that has been blowing up Tumblr over the last week or so, and it made me laugh until I cried, so if any of you haven’t seen it yet, treat yourself to what is being called by appreciative readers “Porn Prison”:

http://ofgeography.tumblr.com/post/94085997576/so-heres-a-fun-story-about-this-movie-guess-who

(Despite the title, this is completely fine for work; well, the content is fine – you will absolutely audibly laugh.)

—Anna

The Yellow Wallpaper

by Anna

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Rebecca linked to The Toast in an entry a while ago, and since then, I’ve become a complete Toast convert, going to back and trying to read just about every entry. One of my favorite series is the “Texts From…”, which is imagined text dialogues involving famous authors or characters.

Texts from The Yellow Wallpaper was so particularly good that I was inspired to read the original, a 6,000 word story first published in 1892 and available on the Kindle for free. It was so good! The story is narrated by a woman confined to a room for her health, and it is considered an early feminist narrative, which didn’t actually increase my desire to read it, since I find that capital-F feminist writing can be overly sincere for me. However, the writing and characterization are so subtly creepy that it was really just a terrific suspense story first, with feminist commentary second, and it can all be read in just an hour or two.

Oh, and I haven’t had a chance to properly explore this, but Rebecca insisted I mention it. The Toast recently promoted another website that reviews works that are on the public domain: http://publicdomainreview.org/

It is understandably somewhat overwhelming, since that is a lot of content, but it should also be hugely interesting and worthwhile.

—Anna

75 Greatest Living Female Authors

by Rebecca

This is a short post, just to let you know that Abe Books has posted a reader-generated list of the 75 greatest living female authors. Everyone should go check it out:

75 Greatest Living Female Authors

I’ve read books by only 21 of them, and really enjoyed the ones by 18 of them.

Also, if you don’t know Abe Books, they’re a super useful resource. If (when) Amazon lets me down regarding finding some esoteric book or I’m looking for a specific edition of a book, then Abe Books is extremely helpful.

Code Name Verity ALERT

by Kinsey

YOU GUYS. THERE IS A FOLLOW-UP TO CODE NAME VERITY. I have no idea how I missed this, but Elizabeth Wein’s Rose Under Fire is a companion to one of the best, and most heart breaking, things I read last year. I’m starting it tonight and fully expect to be crying tomorrow. I guess I could have waited until I finished the book and reviewed it, but I felt like this was a discovery you needed to hear about immediately. MORE CODE NAME VERITY, PEOPLE!