Accessorizing with Lit
Straight from this week’s New York Magazine, a guide to what your literary journal says about you —
- The Paris Review – You wear blazers with only a dash of irony and lament the deplorable state of modern cocktail parties. You consider T.C. Boyle a hip young writer
- The Believer and McSweeney’s – You balance your hipster wit with do-gooder earnestness. You thought Colbert kicked ass at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
- n+1 – You think McSweeney’s writers are lightweights. You take pride in perfecting your intellectualized rants—cell phones and exercise as talismans of cultural decline, etc.
- Granta – You studied abroad in Britain, and you still won’t shut up about it. Graham Greene is your idol, and you use words like reportage.
March 20, 2007 4:29 pm Other Links to this Post
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Baby Got Books » n+1 — March 21, 2007 @ 8:07 am
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By DJ Cayenne, March 20, 2007 @ 4:57 pm
I believe that I am firmly in that Believer camp. It’s the only one of the above that I subscribe to. The list is missing The Virginia Quarterly, which Bookslut talks about more or less constantly. I’ve read a few issues of TVQ and its pretty good. I don’t know what it says as a fashion accessory though.
There was a big brou-ha-ha (sp?) with n+1 that I’ve been meaning to post about. They sound like a bunch of humorless jerks. Plus their title sounds like an academic statistics journal.
By Frank, March 21, 2007 @ 11:45 am
A bit off topic, but have you seen the pissed off posts on blogs this week about McSweeney’s desire to renege on the lifetime subscriptions it sold to people back in ’99? A typically-snarky Gawker story is here, http://gawker.com/news/mcsweeneys/dave-eggers-desperate-to-welsh-on-bad-bet-244079.php, and one fuming blogger is here, http://www.lindsayism.com/2007/03/this_is_bullsht.html.
By DJ Cayenne, March 21, 2007 @ 12:27 pm
I saw the story. Sometimes I wonder about our blogging credibility – I just can’t work up the vitriol…
I certainly understand McSweeney’s position though…
By Frank, March 21, 2007 @ 1:18 pm
Seems to me the haters completely lost sight of the fact that the proposal was completely optional — i.e., if a lifetime subscriber didn’t want to take the package of McSweeney’s swag in exchange for forfeiting the subscription, s/he didn’t have to. So, yes, why all the vitriol?
By DJ Cayenne, March 21, 2007 @ 3:02 pm
Incomprehensively, to me anyway, there are some people out there who loathe Eggers and would love to see him fail. I just can’t relate to that kind of hatred. Unless, of course, we’re talking about Hall & Oates.