Corinne Segal talks with the staff of Nightboat Books for Literary Hub’s Interview with an Indie Press series. Lindsey Boldt, editorial director tells Segal: “When it comes to selecting manuscripts for Nightboat, more than anything I want to be surprised. Next, I want to feel pleasure, but what surprises or pleases me may be different from what surprises or pleases my colleagues and vice versa. Knowing that we each have our specific biases, desires, and sense of personal and political stakes, we try to build in space for a variety of editorial sensibilities at multiple levels: involving everyone on staff in editorial meetings, mentoring young editors as they acquire their first books, and by reaching outside our immediate circle to engage editors working in the field as editors-at-large.”
At BOMB, Sebastian Castillo, Tom Laplaige, Jon Lindsay, and Crow Jonah Norlander have a roundtable discussion about the work of Garielle Lutz. Many readers, Jon Lindsey included, come to Lutz through her essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place.” Sebastian Castillo and Tom Laplaige both note that Lutz is best read on paper, not screens, but that her stories tend to stretch “sayability” and seem most at home as “‘inside the mind’ reading.” Crow Jonah Norlander lists some of Lutz’s “Familiar words stretched into something strange and yet completely comprehensible”: marmaladen, lacklustrously, batchlet, shackliness, venerealizing, soilures.
“When the tendrils of human society retreat from you so that you are no longer within the warmth of the tribe’s embrace but also no longer ensnared within the mesh of its netting—you can get a little kooky.” Read a new piece of flash fiction by Eugene Lim at the New Yorker.
For Gawker, B. D. McClay writes about “letting people enjoy things” and the dangers of fandom culture in criticism. McClay notes that negative criticism can be as service-driven as the positive mode and identifies the tendency toward consensus as the real concern. At stake is “how to talk about things you love (or hate) impersonally. What is lost in fandom is ultimately detachment. Detachment can coexist with love, hatred, and indifference. But it’s never an especially attractive quality, and when people are encouraged to identify themselves with their interests and consumption habits, it’s also a very hard one to maintain.”
At Columbia Journalism Review, a report on the journalists who have gotten out of Afghanistan and those who are still there. Reporters are mostly being left alone, for now, as the main story has been the Taliban’s victory. But that will likely change: “In recent days, some evidence has emerged that the Taliban is starting to target journalists who have worked with foreign media.”