Creative 5/13/2022

This week, a sexual reawakening at The Believer, a plagiarism scandal (or two).

UP FOR DISCUSSION

 

https://twitter.com/zachsilberberg/status/1522264594902929409?s=20&t=IK5nIrDx2oKDs3tB3JjTrQ

 

 

WHAT’S HAPPENING AT THE BELIEVER?

If you’re on the lit-ernet, you may have seen that The Believer magazine got sold to a surprising owner. ICYMI, The Believer was a beloved literary magazine run out of the Black Mountain Institute of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 

2021 was a bad year for The Believer, for a host of reasons: about a year ago, its editor-in-chief, Joshua Wolf Shenk, exposed himself during a staff Zoom meeting. (Wolf Shenk called in from the bath and then, more confoundingly, he was also wearing a mesh shirt. Like, pick one?) The incident was then extensively covered in the press, which led staffers at The Believer to come forward about a toxic working environment at the journal. The flood of negative attention  “embarrassed the [Black Mountain] Institute and its major funder, Beverly Rogers,” reported Gawker. 

By October, the magazine announced that it would be printing its last issue. We of the literary internet mourned the mag’s demise. 

And then, like a zombie sticking its hand out of scorched earth, The Believer staggered back this week with a bizarre twist. In a URL directing users to the “25 Best Hookup Sites for Flings, New Twists, and Casual Dating,” The Believer posted a confounding update about the future of the publication – albeit, even more strangely, backdated to March 2021. The post contained grammatical errors and a clunky plan to introduce “SEO” (search engine optimization) to the site; former Believer features editor Camille Bromley tweeted, “UNLV’s college of liberal arts appears to have sold a beloved literary magazine with a 20-year history to a content farm.” 

But it’s not just any content farm. UNLV confirmed that they did, in fact, sell the magazine to a company called Paradise Media … aka Sex Toy Collective. In a now-deleted tweet, Sex Toy Collective – also known as the publisher of such articles as “Dildo University: If you mold it they will cum” – wrote, “Hi, this is the new owner of The Believer. We purchased the website to keep the archives up. Our goal is to bring back the magazine, but since it was losing tens of thousands a month we need to get it making money using SEO then use that to bring back all the original writers.” 

?? !! ??

Another former Believer staffer, Kristen Radtke, tweeted that former staffers pushed for UNLV to sell The Believer to McSweeney’s, the magazine’s original publisher. “Instead,” she wrote, “they sold The Believer to Paradise Media/Sex Toy Collective, which has since begun posting adult ads to the site.” 

In a statement to Gawker, Paradise Media’s owner – who, like his company, goes by a litany of names, including Ian, Ian Munro, and Ian Moe – wrote, “I really just want what’s best for the Magazine as I read it a lot in college and [am] a big fan. I was lucky enough to be able to be in a position to afford purchasing it.” Moe agreed it was “a mistake to reach out via our sex toy website.” But, he told VICE, “I thought reaching out with STC might help because we have a good mission. We make sure all products are non-toxic.”

The Believer’s founders, alongside a number of editors, signed an open letter this week saying that they are “currently exploring all our options” to figure out where to go next.  

TLDR, OR, THE LITERARY DRAMA ROUNDUP

I’m sure you caught wind of the whole meta-plagiarism debacle, which many agreed was more sad than anything else: author Jumi Bello penned a piece for LitHub this week about how her debut novel was shelved after she told her publisher that parts of it were plagiarized, and then that piece was yanked from LitHub after it turned out that it, too, was plagiarized, The New York Times reported. 

Others, like critic Lucy Mercer, are undoubtedly original. In a review for ArtReview, Mercer panned Sheila Heti’s much-hyped “Pure Colour” as “the worst book I’ve read in some time.” Meanwhile, Medieval Twitter – a place I can only hope is rife with little cherubs farting into trumpets and so on – dissolved into “furor” and “fracas” over a negative review of “The Bright Ages” by Matthiew Gabriele and David Perry. Ensnared in the mix are multiple PhDs, the LA Review of Books, a sad face made out of mayonnaise, and, tragically, exactly zero cherubs farting into trumpets. 

In the present day, the Associated Press reports that a slated second book by Peter-Thiel-mentee-turned-political-hopeful J.D. Vance was shelved. The book was supposed to be published through HarperCollins.

And finally, poet and writer Ladan Osman alleged that her former “Sun of the Soil” collaborator Joe Penney made legal threats against her in an “attempt to steal or control my film work.” In a Twitter thread “as long as a CVS receipt” Osman claimed that she has not received any payment from the film’s deal with Netflix. 

BEST OF LIT TWITTER

– In response to the baffling developments at The Believer, Kristen Radtke encouraged people to share subscription links for their favorite magazines and lit journals.
– Two agents at the Goldin Agency, Caroline Eisenmann and Ayla Zuraw-Friedland shared their thoughts on professional skills that would be useful for writers to learn in MFA programs, and the value of publishing industry professionals directly instructing such writers.
– Lillian Wang Selonick, who didn’t do an MFA program, asked which writing workshops and residencies are the most useful. The consensus: PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship, Yaddo, One Story’s fellowship for non-MFAs, and many more.
– Shome Dasgupta shared a message that matters for writers early in their careers: have faith in your writing!
– Cassie Mannes Murray urged emerging writers to remember that, even if they get a contract from “a certain small press,” they should ask someone to look over their contract and request changes for what they deserve.
– Very fun and extremely thorough: UK bookstore Waterstones tweeted a thread of Met Gala 2022 looks as books.

AWARD ZONE

– The winners of the 2022 Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week. Awarded titles include “The Netanyahus” by Joshua Cohen in the fiction category, “Chasing Me To My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South” by Winfred Rembert, as told to Erin I. Kelly for the biography category, and “frank: sonnets” by Diane Seuss in the poetry category. 

CRAFT CORNER

– On Twitter, Dr. Han VanderHart instructed writers that those sections of text you keep deleting, then replacing, in your manuscript are worth keeping.
– Natalie Marino argued that the best way for a writer to assess what’s working and not working about their draft is to submit it.
– At The New Yorker, Mary Norris brought poetry to etymology through an in-depth, full-hearted ode to the hyphen.
– For Gawker, Houman Barekat diagnosed Graham Caveney’s memoir about his agoraphobia as part of a genre of “affliction” writing.
– Five writers talked to LitHub about “the weird shame of publishing a book.”
– LA Review of Books interviewed Hernan Diaz about his new book, “In the Distance.”

THE LATEST IN LIBRARIES

– “More than 25 major organizations, including a host of publishers and author and bookseller groups” joined a campaign by the American Library Association called Unite Against Book Bans, reported Publisher’s Weekly. Some of the ALA’s new partners are major publishers Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster, and nonprofit org the Human Rights Campaign.
– Admittedly, this is using the word “library” loosely, but: Dolly Parton’s nonprofit, the Imagination Library, pledged to donate books to 200 refugee children in London. 

DEALS, DEALS, DEALS

– Nicola Yoon, the Bestselling YA author of “Instructions for Dancing,” sold her first adult novel to Anchor Books. Yoon described her psychological thriller, “One of Our Kind,” as being “part ‘The Stepford Wives,’ part ‘Get Out.’”
– Ukrainian author and soldier Artem Chapeye is currently fighting in the war against Russia from his native Ukraine. This week, Seven Stories Press acquired Chapeye’s debut story collection, “The Ukraine.” One of the stories from the collection was published in The New Yorker in early April.
– Dorothy Koomson, author of “The Ice Cream Girls; I Know What You’ve Done,” struck a two-book deal with Headline Review. The titles will be released in 2024 and 2025.

PAGE TO SCREEN

– When hearing about the success of Lauren Weisberger’s “The Devil Wears Prada,” a scathing work of fiction that many assumed was based on the author’s own experience working as Anna Wintour’s assistant at Vogue, the magazine’s iconic editor-in-chief allegedly commented, “I cannot remember who that girl is.” 

HIGHLIGHTING LITERARY HISTORY

– A century ago, Edna St. Vincent Millay attempted to deal with sudden literary celebrity (The New Yorker).
– Toni Morrison’s tough but sage advice to a writer in a Q&A still resonates with A.J. Verdelle (LitHub).
– At The Baffler, Willis McCumber considers various writers’ attempts to bring abolitionist John Brown to life.
– Mark Rozzo describes Andy Warhol’s debut visit to LA for LitHub.

LOVE FOR LOCAL BOOKSTORES

– “Hello, Bookstore” is a new documentary about The Bookstore, a beloved indie in Massachusetts.
– George Gene Gustines toured more than 30 New York comic book stores and briefed us on the best of them for The New York Times.

RECOMMENDED READING

– Kate Dwyer profiles a new generation of rare book collectors at The New York Times.
– For the BBC, Howard Timberlake examines the “post-book blues” – that wistful feeling when you’ve come to the end.
– At Hazlitt, Rachel Vorona Cote chronicles “the life, death, and rebirth of MTV Books.”
– Writers including Meaghan Winter, Rachel Pearson, Clair Wills, and Christine Henneberg respond to the leaked Supreme Court draft ruling on abortion in a special feature for The New York Review of Books (“The End of ‘Roe’?”).
– Natasha Stagg reviews a new Semiotext(e) anthology of writings by Cookie Mueller for Bookforum.
– And two in LitHub: in Kharkiv, Kateryna Volkova describes the continued labor at Vivat, “one of the largest publishers in Ukraine,” while Emmeline Clein critiques “the sisterhood of sad literary girls” in an effort to uplift the late Pamela Moore.

AND EVERYTHING ELSE

– Following the announcement of the remaining cast of the TV adaptation of “Percy Jackson,” in a blog post, author Rick Riordan chastised online critics who perpetrated “racist backlash” against the casting of Leah Jeffries, who is Black, as Annabeth Chase, who was originally written as white.
– In response to a list of banned books in a South Dakota school district that included author Dave Eggers’ “The Circle,” Eggers announced that he would personally purchase copies of any of the other banned books on the list for “high school seniors who want to read them.” The other books in question include “The Perks of Being A Wallflower” and “Fun Home.”
– As Janelle Monáe’s debut science fiction collection “The Memory Librarian” rakes in positive reviews, the multi-hyphenate told the New York Times that, as a kid, she had been kicked out of an after-school writing workshop.
– A comics publisher is doing its best to publish semi-obscured works by Dr. Seuss that have fallen into the public domain. But Dr. Seuss Enterprises L.P. is doing whatever it can to stop them.
– Caprese with no tomatoes? Groundbreaking: shocked by a reveal about Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour’s go-to lunch order, Emilia Petrarca taste tested it for Grub Street.
– At Vulture, Mimi Kramer explores “what makes a great, or terrible, audio book performance” and the search for an authoritative female voice.
– The Paris Review’s engagement editor, Rhian Sasseen, is leaving her role to pursue an MFA in fiction at NYU.
– Jon Yaged is taking over from Don Weisberg as CEO of Macmillan Publishers.
– In New York, iconic stage actress Patti LuPone yells at a maskless audience member following a Broadway performance of “Company.”