Friday Links

I was going to call this post “Art Linkletter” or something else equally clever (get it? Linkletter? Shakespeare used puns too, you know). But I think that gets sort of confusing, especially for new readers. So I’ll just stick with “Friday Links” for a while.

A lot of good stuff this week. First up is an article on Emily Dickinson’s mysterious “Master” letters. It seems the poet wrote three letters (never sent) to someone she only calls “Master.” Maybe this was someone she knew; maybe it was God. Nobody knows. I think the article’s author gets pretty carried away with his analysis, but if you just read it for the facts, it’s very intriguing.

Next we have a gallery of actual rejected book covers. I think these are cool because they do look like covers you’d see in a book store, but you can usually identify some aspect that makes you think, “Nope, that’s not going to work.” Also a useful reminder that writers aren’t the only ones in the industry dealing with rejection.

Now we come to something that isn’t new, but I only discovered it this week, so it’s new to me. There’s a literary journal called “The Paris Review” that’s done a series of interviews, over the past sixty years, with some of the biggest names in the literary world: Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Harold Bloom. I want to particularly recommend this one with John Steinbeck, which is actually more a collection of his thoughts than a proper interview. Lots of really wonderful material for aspiring authors. And I loved this quote about his own fame: “Little presses write to me for manuscripts and when I write back that I haven’t any, they write to ask if they can print the letter saying I haven’t any.”

Also, this just made me laugh.

Finally, this has absolutely nothing to do with books or writing, but I’d be sad if I didn’t link to it, so here you go. Marcel the Shell. Nope, I have no idea either.

Have a good weekend, everybody!