June Updates: a New Open Letters Monthly and a Fun Q&A!

First of all, the June issue of Open Letters Monthly is up! I won’t itemize all of its contents, because I hope you’ll come over and have a look for yourself. But I will mention that it is the first issue in a while to include something by every editor. We’re pretty proud about that. My own contribution is this month’s “Title Menu” feature. We’ve always talked a lot about the popularity of the so-called “listicle,” but most of the ones we’d seen around just didn’t seem substantial enough for the lofty aspirations we have for long-form writing at OLM. Then it occurred to us that there’s no reason a list has to be trivial, or that long(er)-form writing can’t be fun. So we’ve been experimenting with our own version of the listicle since January, with all kinds of cool topics from memorable birth scenes to art crime to books that might (or might not) be poetry. Mine lists eight books inspired by George Eliot — there are others, I know, but these are ones I’ve particularly enjoyed.

In other news, I had mentioned not long ago that I would be participating in a Q&A on Twitter organized by the folks who run the Atlantic’s #1book140 club.* For a while I thought maybe it wasn’t going to happen after all, since #1book140 decided not to officially read to the end of Middlemarch (I’m not sure how much participation they usually get in their discussions, but it did seem to me that things weren’t exactly hopping on the hashtag). But it did! They talked Stephen Burt into being the Q to my A, and he and I had a grand old time going back and forth for an hour last night. He had a lot of interesting questions for me. One in particular that I had never thought about before was how the most famous “takeout quotations” from the novel change when you look at them actually in the novels. The Atlantic people are putting together a ‘Storify’ of our conversation, so when it’s ready I’ll be sure to post a link to it so you can find out not just what I said about that but which character in the novel I most identified with at 18, and what quotation I would choose if I ever opted to get a Middlemarch tattoo! I so much enjoyed exchanging ideas and favorite moments from the novel with someone else who’s excited about it: it made me realize that I’ve been thinking about it in the abstract recently more than I’ve actually been reading it. Hooray for having put it on my book list for 19thC Fiction in the fall term and having an excuse to go once more into all the details.

*In case you’re wondering how good this has been for the stats over at Middlemarch for Book Clubs, you’ll be glad to know that it has increased the hits there by literally dozens.