Paper Trail

Lucie Elven on craft and misreading; Lauren Michele Jackson reviews the film adaptation of Passing


Lucie Elven. Photo: Sophie Davidson

The New York Mag Union has an illustrated Twitter thread with stories from New York magazine staff who have left the magazine.

Tupelo Press has announced that it will publish four manuscripts out of more than one thousand that had been submitted during the press’s open reading period this summer. J. Mae Barizo, Preeti Kaur Rajpal, Mike Lala, and Kate Partridge will each receive a $1,000 advance and will be published, promoted, and distributed by Tupelo.

For 4Columns, Lauren Michele Jackson reviews the film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, “a story of erstwhile friends reacquainting” while one of them lives as a white woman. The film is shot in black and white. Jackson writes: “As fiction by William Wells Brown (Clotel), Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), and Danzy Senna (Caucasia) exhibits, passing is as much a matter of what’s happening around a body as what appears visually, as surface. That is, it’s not all about color, not exactly.”

Applications for the Jane Hoppen Residency at New York City’s Paragraph writer’s workspace are open through December 15. The residency will give four emerging writers of the LGBTQ+ community and/or whose work explores LGBTQ+ topics access to Paragraph’s writing spaces.

At Granta, Lucie Elven, author of The Weak Spot, writes about her process. The first step: “I make a list of accidents – sentences I’ve misread with my misreading left in them; speech I’ve overheard or heard wrong; lines from my email outbox. Emailing can occasionally bring out an approachable, thoughtless or direct tone in me. I don’t think you can artificially replicate the energy of that kind of phrase.”

Rachel Syme and Erik Hinton are hosting “Screwball Fall,” an online movie club devoted to screwball comedies including Bringing Up Baby, Some Like It Hot, Adam’s Rib and more.