They’re going to make the National Book Awards dinner a flashy thing, like the Oscars/Man Booker: The goal is to add more sex appeal to an industry that’s not exactly known for it — but not, the organizers insist, just for its own sake. “It’s not about being glitzy,” said David Steinberger, the chief executive of Perseus Books and chairman of the foundation. “It’s about increasing the impact great books have on the culture.”

“Sirk has said you can’t make films about something, you can only make films with something — with people, with light, with flowers, with mirrors, with blood, with all these crazy things that make it worthwhile.”

— Fassbinder

That’s how I feel with poetry.

When people use social media to promote their books, that is their way of saying that they can’t be bothered to figure out how to actually promote their books. When people tell you to use Facebook to promote your book, what they are doing is giving you a way to keep very busy while no one at all reads you.

<:-O___>:-0___\:-/_____ “Can anything be poetic? Well maybe the same way nearly anything can be spray-painted.”

The 2012 Literary Magazine Rankings! As compiled by a single dude, based on a single source.

Wish I lived in a world where we could all meet at Hooters and watch Ploughshares and Conjunctions face-off in the Tostitos Literary Fiesta Bowl.

2012 Whiting Award winners announced: Writeup at LA Times

Why does 99.9999999999999999% of political writing seem to have such a short shelf life?

R.I.P. George McGovern.

Here, as part of a larger feature on “Book Blogs.” (The review is by Matthew Vollmer.)

(To read the whole thing, you need Project Muse access, but even without it you can read some of the thing.)

(The feature was edited by Brian Carr, and includes reviews of NewPages and The Rumpus and The Millions and Big Other and The Nervous Breakdown and Bookslut and The Barking and MobyLives. Also, one of those reviews is by Mike Meginnis, and one is by Roxane Gay.)

I read Benjamin Anastas’s novel An Underachiever’s Diary a while back and liked it.  I read these Salon and Daily Beast excerpts from his new memoir Too Good to Be True today and I feel profoundly anxious about money, relationships, and–most of all–writing as a career.