Alt Wire is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Stephen Elliott, editor of The Rumpus. 

It's Nice That: A relaxing place. The design is amazing.

HTMLGIANT: I shouldn't be name dropping HTMLGIANT because they're likely to put The Rumpus out of business, but when I feel like literary discussion this is where I go. I'm also very fond of The Millions, Maud Newton, and Bookslut.

New York Times: Here's something you've already heard of. I go to this site more than any other. I think most of us do. We all complain about it but is there any other news website you can actually trust? We should be more supportive of the Times, I think.

Carnal Nation: Good sex writing.

The Lefsetz Letter: This is just great writing about the music industry. But it's much better when you subscribe to it as an email.

BIO: Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books including The Adderall Diaries which was the best book of the year in Time Out New York, a best of 2009 in Kirkus Reviews, and one of 50 notable books in the San Francisco Chronicle. Elliott's writing has been featured in The New York Times, and The Believer. He is the editor of The Rumpus.

300 Reviews is a curious, trenchant, and charming criticism website that publishes 300-word reviews of everything from the gender binary to cats. It may remind you of The Rumpus’s Ted Wilson Reviews the World, which we’ve already expressed public love for, but 300 Reviews is a bit more serious and varied compared to Wilson’s loopy digressions. Plus, 300 Reviews has a diverse cast of reviewers—and is always looking for new contributors. Maybe you want to review your wicker chair? Or perhaps your Grandmother? Maybe that’s just me.

Image by zenera, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Publisher's Weekly blog PWxyz put out a call for readers to nominate America's most underrated writers and picked 15 favorites from the list. It's a good time. "Now all that’s left to do is give these writers their due," writes Craig Morgan Teicher, "go buy their books, talk ‘em up to your friends and enemies, and make them the literary titans they deserve to be!"

Who would you add to the list?

(Thanks, The Rumpus.)

Source: PWxyz

Image by @sahxic < twitter, licensed under Creative Commons.

Are you familiar with Ted Wilson? He’s a retired accountant, a tuba player, a widower, and an artist. What really makes Ted Wilson noteworthy, however, is his delightfully cracked weekly column for The Rumpus: Ted Wilson Reviews the World. The latest entry is a sarcastic, goofball masterpiece, as Wilson opens by writing, “Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the name Larry.” From there, the absurdity explodes straight off a cliff and into the smoking wasteland of disgrace that is (apparently) the name Larry. It's a land where “[e]ven people with names like Ralph or Chastity feel an unspoken sadness when meeting someone named Larry.” If there were some sort of election for National Internet Grandpa, I’d vote Ted Wilson.

Source: The Rumpus

The publishing blog Pimp My Novel has a few pointed notes about the now-standard author advances, including a consideration of whether foregoing advances would help publishers/authors/readers:

There are many arguments for and against the no-advance model, but I think it's best summed up as follows: publishers will be much more willing to take risks on new authors if they don't need to pay an advance, but since this removes the "we paid for this and we have to make it work" pressure, many a publisher may reduce the amount of time, money, and effort spent on marketing these books. While a no-advance model would likely result in a higher royalty rate for the author, it won't do much good if net sales are damaged by a reduction in in-house support.

Of course, the issue doesn’t end there. Twitter has been abuzz (or atwit, or atweet) with conversation about the topic. It may be kind of insider-y, but hey now we’re on the inside, too. Thanks, uncle internet!

(Thanks, The Rumpus.)

Source: Pimp My Novel

Image by photomequickbooth, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Los Angeles Times’ book blog Jacket Copy has an update on the imprisonment of Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo:

On Christmas Day last year, Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years in prison for his part in creating Charter 08, a document calling for greater freedoms and democratic reforms in China. On Tuesday, the international human rights and literary organization PEN announced that it has learned that Liu Xiaobo has been moved from a detention center in Beijing to Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning.

(Thanks, The Rumpus.)

Source: Jacket Copy

Image by waffler, licensed under Creative Commons.

The good people at The Rumpus have come up with a new way of doing the book club, and it's awesome. I'll let them explain:

Here’s how it’s going to work. You pay $25 a month and every month you get a book in the mail that hasn’t been released yet. You’re invited to a moderated online discussion with the author at the end of the month which we’ll edit and run on The Rumpus as a feature article. You can also write a review of the book and we’ll run the best written review on the website. You don’t have to participate in the discussion or review the book, you could just subscribe to receive a new, unpublished book every month.

We’re going to try to only read good books. We’ll fail sometimes. Some books that are out now we would have liked to include are Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, Emily Gould’s And The Heart Says Whatever, and David Goodwillie’s American Subversive. The books will often be hardcover, but not always. Sometimes they’ll be galleys, also known as ARCs, Advance Reader Copies, pre-printed paperbacks. It’s neat because we’re going to have a discussion about new books, rather than waiting to be told what books are approved for cultural consumption. It used to be that only people in the media got advance copies of books but that wall has come down quite a bit. Now everybody’s a reviewer.

It’ll be easy to unsubscribe from the book club at any time.

Source: The Rumpus

Image by ckaroli, licensed under Creative Commons.

The literary blog The Rumpus has posted a collection of images from found Iranian children's books. The images are incredible, and it's been fun watching as readers who speak Farsi write in with translations and other information. Enjoy!

Source: The Rumpus 

“More crappy news for short story writers,” is how The Rumpus interpreted a literary agent’s polite rejection note to short story writer writer Mark Tainer:

... I have no confidence in being able to place a collection at this time in the world of publishing. Publishers don't like to publish short story collections in general unless they are VERY high concept or by someone very strange or very famous or Indian. In the current climate, it is harder to publish even those. Some of the authors I represent have story collections I have not been able to talk their loyal publishers into publishing. I can't in good conscience encourage you to send them to me. It will just make both of us feel bad. I am very sorry. If you write another novel, I will gladly read it...

This triggered Rumpus blogger Seth Fischer. “The form of the short story collection is so uniquely well-suited to the Internet age,” writes Fischer. “A good short story should grab you by the junk and make you yelp in that first line. So should good web copy. A good short story should be no longer than it need be. So should good web copy. There are many very important differences between the two types of writing, but the publishing houses could be taking advantage of the similarities to develop a model that could turn a profit.”

Is the publishing industry’s lethargy towards short story collections really news? A commenter at Tainer’s blog points to a newspaper column by short story writer Dennis Loy Johnson, who took up the issue way back in 2001:

The problem, it is often said, is that story collections have never sold much, although I'd point out that they've never been promoted much, either. Hype them as heavily as some novels get hyped — Raymond Carver, Melissa Bank — and they sell just fine, thank you. I mean, no American should ever forget that we live in a country where someone not that long ago made a fortune selling pet rocks at Christmastime.

“It seems to me that all it would take is a tiny bit of ingenuity to make money off the right short story collection,” writes Fischer. “Why aren’t the publishing houses trying it?”

Are you supporting the lowly short story writer? When was the last time you paid for short stories?

Source: The Rumpus 

Image by ginnerobot, licensed under Creative Commons.

In the category of brilliant ideas: If you make less than $25,000/year, you can request a free galley copy of Stephen Elliott’s true-crime memoir The Adderall Diaries, released today from Graywolf Press. (Galleys are those advance reader copies, soft-cover editions that sometimes find homes in reading programs and the like, but too often end up in recycling bins.)

Read about the free book offer at The Rumpus, which Elliott edits, plus details of his book tour.

Source: Graywolf Press, The Rumpus

When you write do you need to sit at a desk? Or, are you a lie-on-the-bed, laptop-on-your-chest kind of writer? George Pendle writes for Cabinet that when Gustave Flaubert declared “One cannot think and write except when seated”, it so inflamed Friedrich Nietzsche that he attacked Flaubert in his book Twilight of the Idols: “There I have caught you nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value.”

Nietzsche’s rant against what he perceived as cultural decadence sparked a debate about the ideal physical mode for inspiration that has spilled into our modern ideas about work. Hemingway proclaimed that “writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” He was joined by Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll in his Nietzschean preference for active creativity. But Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, and Truman Capote liked to write while lying down. Indeed, Capote called himself a “completely horizontal writer.”

In 1968 designer Bob Probst unwittingly echoed Nietzsche when he bemoaned the grid-like layout of American office spaces, which “blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.” So, he designed the Action Office System, whose moveable partitions were intended to inspire workers to stand and move around. When it came to the link between creativity and physical engagement, it seemed, Nietzsche was right.

However, the ideas behind the Action Office System were quickly co-opted into a means for cramming as many workers as possible into one space. The dream of active work turned into the dreaded cubicle. Sedentary inspiration, it seems, has prevailed.

Sources: Cabinet, The Rumpus (reprinted original article, which is otherwise not available online) 

The term “hipster” has become a mark of derision. It’s mostly used in the context of “get out of my way, you damn hipsters,” or “that place is filled with stupid hipsters.” Writing on a personal blog A Fantasy of Flight, former 826 Valencia intern Zoe Ruiz explains why she’s not going to call people hipsters anymore:

At the point in time that I began to use the term hipsters I was very much dissatisfied with myself, with my life, and with anyone I met. I am not now dissatisfied with myself (most of the time). Hipster has become a word that carries a sense of dissatisfaction and a bit of anger. I have no use for a word that carries such a mood.

Better to leave the Hipster Olympics to other people:

(Thanks, The Rumpus.)

Source: A Fantasy of Flight 

High school field trips can be nightmarish under normal circumstances, but when your student secretly doses you with LSD, the outing isn’t likely to be fun. Luckily (or highly problematically, depending on how you look at it) John Moss had 10 years of following the Grateful Dead to train him for the experience. Writing for Bohemian.com, Moss recounts how he tried to keep his hallucinations under wraps, and keep the field trip from becoming a tragedy. Here’s a key quote: “Hallucinations were rare in my previous LSD experience, but I already had dancing trees, bouncy sidewalks and exploding flowers. Dangerous signs this early in the trip.” 

(Thanks, The Rumpus.)

Adapted from image by  Crystl , licensed under  Creative Commons .