Literary Gossip, August 2023

Merve, Riley, Stephen Elliott, MFA Discourse, and Covid at Breadloaf.

Hey all, this might be my only post this week, as I’m under the gun both for the first draft of What’s So Great About The Great Books, and line edits for The Default World.

It’s interesting finding my niche on Substack, because until now my impression has been that most of the people who follow me online are aspiring writers—often writers of commercial fiction—who found me because I’m unusually forthright about various aspects of the writing career. But as a Great Books blogger, the audience is slightly different. However, my main job / vocation is still writing fiction, and I assume some of my readers are interested in the contemporary literary world too.

One thing I miss about Twitter is the gossip. Twitter is not only a place to relay events that happen elsewhere, but the doings on Twitter themselves become gossip. I thought it would be fun to give a run-down of some of the recent literary gossip for other people who aren’t on Twitter as often. I spend about five hours a week hunting down Twitter gossip anyway, so this really involves no extra work for me.