Elizabeth Minkel

theatlanticcities: “The entrance tickets they carry are in the...

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:35:48 -0400

“The entrance tickets they carry are in the form of a pocket watch – which can only be obtained as a gift – with a reservation number and instructions inside advising against high heels and to be ready for a bit of climbing.

A door opens, and once shuttled inside all are told to turn off phones, refrain from photography or tweeting, and that you are in fact trespassing. While they have done their best, the Night Heron cannot guarantee your safety. Follow me.”

Read: Into the Water Tower, With Flair

I had the good fortune to attend the final seating at the Night Heron a few weeks back—I’m friends with…I suppose I’m supposed to call him just by his initials here, N.D., and he was kind enough to badger me into coming after I did a lot of whinging about having bronchitis for a month. If I’d had any idea what was in store for me, I wouldn’t have needed convincing (I clearly feel foolish about this in retrospect). Afterwards, I told other friends it was one of the greatest things I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in New York, and they all looked at me with a combination of disbelief and annoyance, but, I mean.

[“Take a short story and carve it on a bullet and just...

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:04:07 -0400

[“Take a short story and carve it on a bullet and just fire it into my skull.”]

I’ve got a new piece up at The Millions:

George Saunders and the Question of Greatness

It actually began as a little tumblr post—reactions to Saunders’s appearance on Colbert shortly after “Tenth of December” came out in January, and then a reading he gave at Greenlight, and then (finally) attempting to read the book. I was going to post it here, but it kept spinning into something longer, so off it went to The Millions. Here’s the paragraph about Greenlight—I think it encapsulates a lot of the feelings:

It must have been a week or so before that, when my friends and I were huddled in the very back corner of Greenlight Bookstore here in the middle of Brooklyn, just a few feet from the stockroom, so many shelf-lined antechambers away from the man that we may as well have been in a different city, listening to him read a teasing bit of “Escape from Spiderhead” and answer questions over the PA system, and the first one was that old chestnut, where’s the novel we’ve all been waiting for?, and after he said that he lacked the momentum to “accrue pages”—“I think of my stories as kind of like those little toys and you wind ’em up and put it on the floor and it goes under the couch”—the guy beside me let out this soft, disappointed sigh, like he’d just learned exactly why his child had been sent to the principal’s office, or he was watching the scene in a movie where two lovers fated to die come this close to finding each other—but not quite.

The tire blew out somewhere just north of the Tappan Zee Bridge,...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:44:00 -0400

The tire blew out somewhere just north of the Tappan Zee Bridge, southbound on I-87. We were in a comically old green minivan, one I’ve never ridden in without receiving some sort of disclaimer about the car being as old as time itself, or, at the very least, as old as its owner’s son—a person just about to graduate from college. A quick visit to said son was the reason for our journey upstate; I was tagging along, happy to for an excuse and the means to get out of New York City on a spring day. Things went well—nearly perfectly—until we felt the car lurching beneath our feet less than an hour from our homes in Brooklyn. We were in the left-middle lane; she could only pull over to the shoulder-less median, hugging the concrete barrier. It was firmly nighttime; the only light came from the steady stream of cars whipping past, shaking the van as they barely swerved around us. Basically, terrifying.

It wasn’t my first breakdown, but for a person that only sits in a non-cab car a few times a year, they seem to be happening with alarming frequency. The first and last, prior to yesterday, had been a whole other terrifying set of circumstances: in a rental car with a friend in rural Wales in mid-December, tired and muddy and damp from a walk during which we were hailed on three times in an hour, when we simultaneously heard and felt the tire pop and she swiftly pulled into the “Gower Heritage Centre,” an entry fee of £5.95 and a collection of animatronic mill workers toiling at looms separating us from the warm tea room. So we spent four hours waiting in the useless car in the rain, occasionally traipsing back inside to borrow a phone and make futile calls, to AA and Enterprise car rentals up and down the length of South Wales. Of course, the sun had fully set by 4:30 p.m. There was a sense, sitting in the darkened car park, watching every other vehicle leave until we were truly alone, that we would be stranded there forever.

Our blowout in the Gower was problematic, too, because it knocked down the starting domino into a long chain of careful travel plans—we spent most of our time in that car trying to figure out how to return the goddamned vehicle to literally any Enterprise location—my friend battled with Cardiff Centre and Cardiff Airport and Swansea, the closest city—before they all closed at 6. Once we were safely delivered to Swansea by a pitying AA man, dropping our wounded car in a Mercedes dealership car park with a “note on the dash,” we talked our way onto the next train to London, the last leaving that day—ours had long-since departed. Perhaps it was the painfully late arrival that night the led us to a frantic dash down the Old Brompton Road the next morning, missing the bus to the airport by five minutes at most, but by then it must have been sheer bad luck when our cab was ensnarled in standstill traffic on the M23, the legacy of a fatal pileup. We made it to the check-in counters at Gatwick—we were flying to Amman—with seconds to spare.

The sheer danger of our precarious position last night cast this incident, my second and last breakdown, in a different light. ‘Should I call 911?’ I asked her as she called AAA; at first, I felt skeptical, and then, as the weight of the situation set in and adrenaline ramped up, I knew I had to. I’ve never done it before. The second I got on the line, I turned into a nervous wreck, like I had to convince him that this was worth his time, an event just short of witnessing a murder. But he took it in stride, patching me to the Thruway Authority in seconds. It took them 15 minutes to find us—they kept asking for mile markers, impossible to read from the far left edge of a four-lane highway—but when they did, it was the state, not AAA, barricading us with a bright, hulking vehicle, jacking the car and replacing the tire with astounding efficiency. ‘Be careful!’ my friend shouted as one of them walked along the right-hand-side of the car. He brushed her off with a kind of wry seriousness. All in a day’s work.

The temporary tire gave out just before the exit for Hunt’s Point, in the South Bronx. I said there was no way we were pulling over, not unless the car physically would not move, and my friend soldiered on with remarkable skill, flashers blinking all along the BQE, as drivers careened around us with angry honks. Stepping out of the car and onto Court Street was like dry land after being caught in a hurricane at sea; I walked back to my house unsteadily, each step forward a little jolt of surprise, at the solidity beneath my feet.

Now, a day later, the high has faded, and it all feels a little silly, or maybe the right word is ‘ridiculous’, but that’s not far from the truth. While we were waiting there, sitting ducks, holding our breath for the car that would cut just too close, that would swipe the side of the van, that would ram us from behind at 75 mph, full impact, my friend had announced that after all of this, the car was history. Back on the road, temporary tire chugging along, she was singing the van’s praises. ‘That was all for your benefit,’ she informed me. I made her promise to stick to the quiet streets of Brooklyn from now on.

millionsmillions: Good morning, Tumblr. Nice to you see you...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:09:35 -0400

millionsmillions:

Good morning, Tumblr. Nice to you see you here.

If you’re reading this, it means you’re either awake and on Tumblr at 6 a.m. EST, or you’ve just clicked into The Millions’s new series tab: #TumblrIndex. Going forward, this series will occasionally highlight lists of 4-5 Tumblr pages worth following. In the past, we’ve organized three gigantic, humongous, tremendous monster lists to get literary and artistic folks up to speed on the Tumblr community. But now, with the Tumblr Index series, we’ll be able to keep readers clued into new developments in this community as they happen, and we’ll be able to better explain what it is about each blog that we really enjoy.

Hope to see you around in the future!

Take note!

(and let us acknowledge that I was not awake at 6 a.m. EST)

the august syndrome

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:55:13 -0400

Every summer for, oh, maybe the past three years or so, I have begun to write a piece that I’ve repeatedly (doggedly) titled “The August Syndrome.” I even had a catchy subtitle: “On the migratory habits of my friends.” I’ve had this sense that August, which up until my working adult life was a hot and lazy waste of a month, was actually the worst possible thing in your twenties: all the proper adults with money and copious time off hit the road, leaving Brooklyn this weird sweaty wasteland and you’re drinking $8 beers in abandoned lots that have been converted to bars and you’re generally not happy. But then, that’s mostly because you’re at said bars for goodbye parties.

Because my friends all moved to New York after graduation, and a few of them love it and will never leave, but most of us will leave, and some of us love it, and some of us will return, but when you spend a few years here (and I’ve gone huge swaths of time without even leaving the five boroughs; I often feel…mired?) the thought of leaving grows into something that’s annoyingly large and unmanageable. At least for me, anyway. So the past few years I’ve said goodbye to close friends and less-close friends, mostly off to school of some sort, but a few just off to build a life somewhere else. The August Syndrome makes you question what you’re doing here, even if you’ve been perfectly happy the other eleven months of the year. That, and I hate the heat.

But 2013: never mind all that. Because I’m leaving New York in July.

By last August, I understood the flaw in my logic: I wasn’t so much jealous of the people leaving as frustrated by the desire to go and the lack of a reason to do it. And to be fair, I believe some people have left because they didn’t know what else to do, career stalling or whatever. I didn’t want that; I wanted a place to move to, not just a reason to leave New York. So it was around this time last year that I started to give it some serious thought. The ‘where’ wasn’t so complicated. In the end, the ‘what’ wasn’t too hard, either.

First I’ll spend the racing season in Saratoga, from mid-July to Labor Day. It’s been ages since I’ve been able to do more than a day at the race track, and I’m weirdly thrilled to be headed back to take bets for six weeks. But then after that, I’m moving to London. !!! And it’s true that I have a deeply complicated relationship with the city, but at the heart of that is love, and it’s been so long since I’ve lived in the UK (six years!) that I think I’m long overdue. The exchange rate has improved dramatically.

It’s the ‘what’ I’m most excited about, though. (That might be slightly untrue; I’m really alarmingly thrilled about the ‘where’.) I’m choosing between two Master’s programs in the Digital Humanities—a field that sits at the intersection of scholarly humanities work and technology. It seems to be the most absurdly logical extension of my career thus-far that I could possibly imagine, which is good! Better than good. The promise of having a bonafide reason to set foot in the British Library, beyond “I just want to look at the Magna Carta,” is kind of overwhelmingly awesome.

There are mundane but knotty issues to sort out: I need to dismantle a life in New York, and build some semblance of a life in London, all the while transporting a cat across the ocean (one who, like most cats, barely tolerates a short car ride). But details, details. I’m not worried right now. It’s the big picture that’s coming into focus.

Over at The Millions today, I’m one of six staff writers...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:21:17 -0400

Over at The Millions today, I’m one of six staff writers who contributed to a piece called “I Read About It: Music, Food, Poetry, and Lifestyle Suggestions We’ve Taken from Literature,” in which Janet Potter asked us: “What works of art have you been introduced to by other works of art?” I’m deeply susceptible to certain references in books—the most notable trigger these days is people drinking tea, or more often, people making tea, like to the point where I find myself suddenly hovering over the kettle with no knowledge of travelling into the kitchen. There are more dangerous habits, I suppose.

My blurb here, though, is a little twisty: in my freshman year of college, obsessed with jazz, I bought a book about it, Geoff Dyer’s “But Beautiful,” and by the time I’d finished with it, I’d all but given up the music—I’d turned back to books, wholeheartedly. Geoff Dyer does that to people. It was the Lester Young chapter that did me in. That’s him, up there. Fading away.

[image source]

tea (at one in the morning)

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:39:25 -0400

There were many things that caught me off guard yesterday.

Like when someone on the radio said, “It’s just like 9/11—on a different scale, of course.”

Like when someone on Facebook—a friend of a friend of a friend—posted something like, “Well, this proves that guns are not actually the problem.” Eleven likes when we first saw it; three dozen an hour later.

Like when someone I follow retweeted the numbers: Monday, 15 April, across Iraq, 75 killed and 356 wounded in a series of coordinated bombings.

Like when I made tea at one in the morning, because this is what I do most nights, and then flipped the radio back on, and maybe they’ve recently changed the schedule or maybe it was being specially broadcast because of the news from Boston, but it was the BBC World Service, and they weren’t saying much about Boston at all. There was a Somali doctor, her English harsh and grating, like they were squeezing the words out of her, talking about an attack on her hospital, women killed in maternity wards, being taken hostage, gruesome violence made pedestrian by war, it was—

I didn’t finish my tea.

I moved to London in the autumn of 2005, in the tense weeks following the Tube bombings, and whether it was in my control or not, I let the seed of worry, of doubt, of fear, worm its way into my mind and blossom during my time there. But nearly a decade later, I feel dangerously impervious. Is it five years in New York, five years working in Times Square, of all places, or is it because those five years have followed the sharpest personal loss? The world hasn’t changed, but I have? Or maybe the world has changed. I keep thinking about that Saturday in December, the day after the shooting in Connecticut, how horrifying it was, that here was an event that I could not even think about without crying, let alone listen to the news. It seems so distant now.

Yesterday was not 9/11, please stop saying that—it’s not anything so callous as a raw numbers game, it’s just that 9/11 was a fucking act of war. This is a tragedy. It is heartbreaking. It feels pointless. Perhaps it is pointless: a sad act by a sad individual? But speculation is utterly useless—it just fills up the silent spaces that we all seem to be so afraid of. That’s the trouble with terrorism: it plants those seeds, worrydoubtfear and most importantly, unknowingness. We are wired to run with it, to spin ourselves into oblivion.

Spring kind of burst out of nowhere over the weekend; yesterday was alarmingly sweet, pink and white boughs bending gently along my street, the air still a touch too cold. But today, it’s all grey, grey, grey, and there’s just something in the air. New York holds its breath.

I have feelings about this VIDA awfulness, how the 2012 stats...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:43:14 -0400

I have feelings about this VIDA awfulness, how the 2012 stats are out and the pie charts look worse than ever but, well (I am calling the pie charts awful, not VIDA. They seem solid). It’s a shitty and complicated situation. Better things than that could be/should be/have been said about it. But I was looking through a thread on Facebook about this and gender/byline iniquities a few days ago and someone linked to this writing “gender guesser”, where you paste in your text and it guesses the gender of the writer. I just finished a short story; I was curious. The site says something like “make sure you put in at least 300 words for more accurate results” so I pasted the entirety of my 9,000-word story into the box. Behold, the results.

It’s nice to be misleading/confusing but maybe this is also just right. “Informal” means blogs and chat logs and “formal” means fiction and nonfiction, and about 98% of this story is dialogue between a man and a woman. A British man and a British woman. (!) “Weak emphasis could indicate European.” I thought I was being insulted but maybe they’re telling me I did it correctly.

Right now I’m reading “Bloody Foreigners: The Story...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:41:53 -0400

Right now I’m reading “Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain” by Robert Winder. It’s the sort of book I often absently pick up because I like the subject and then never read because, hey, 500 dense pages of nonfiction on the subway: not appealing. But I’m glad I started with this one, because it’s wonderful, brisk and funny but still managing a great deal of depth.

I mention it here because Winder mostly sticks to movements of people, by which I mean group migrations, large and small. But sometimes I think he can’t help himself, and finds a single immigrant who’s just so fucking awesome that he or she gets a whole paragraph. So here, in the mid-eighteenth century, I give you: Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée D’Eon de Beaumont, portrait above:

The licence to be dandyish attracted one of the century’s oddest immigrants: Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée D’Eon de Beaumont. The unusual mixture of masculine and feminine names was neither an accident nor a sentimental whim: the child, born in Burgundy in 1728, was of uncertain sex. In a bizarre compromise he was baptised as a boy, dressed as a girl and dedicated to the Virgin Mary as both. From the age of seven he/she was educated as a boy, eventually graduating as a doctor of law. A use was then found for the ambiguity of her/his appearance; she was sent to St Petersburg on a secret mission to the Empress Elizabeth disguised as a woman. When he returned to France, it was as a captain of dragoons. He came to London in 1762, where he lived lavishly and in public as a man. Challenged by the Count de Guerchy to prove that he was not a woman in man’s clothing, he refused to satisfy the curiosity of the authorities. The public, too, was anxious to know the truth, and there was heavy gambling on the subject. In 1774 the case was resolved against him, and he was ordered to wear women’s clothing. A subsequent case was brought by an incensed (and out-of-pocket) gambler. Again the jury decided that Beaumont was a woman. She cut quite a dash, no doubt, in her ringlets and perfume, though she had not forsworn macho adventures: in 1787 she fought a duel, with swords, in her women’s costume. This earned her some useful celebrity, and for a while afterwards she gave fencing lessons. In 1796 she was wounded and retired, but she survived until 1810. She had spent the last thirty-six years of her life as a woman, so it was something of a shock when it was discovered, on her death, that she had been a man all along. The examining doctor admitted that her throat was ‘by no means masculine’ and that her breast was ‘remarkably full’, but there was no mistaking the more obvious evidence: ‘The male organ’, he said, was ‘in every respect perfectly formed’. He was buried in St Pancras. He had been painted twice: once in a dress, once in military uniform. In 1868 his gravestone was lost during the construction of a railway line out of north London.

[image source]

“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:17:52 -0500

“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available…a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” -Fred Hoyle, 1948

This is absolutely extraordinary. Particularly every part with Edgar Mitchell.

[via Upworthy!]

You know I love “Downton Abbey,” right? Or I did? I...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:32:56 -0500

You know I love “Downton Abbey,” right? Or I did? I still do. I don’t know anymore. I give up.

A new piece for “The Millions” on the show and Julian Fellowes’s general writing decisions (yes, I know, not all of this is his fault, but a lot of it is):

Stages of Television Grief: On the Decline of Downton Abbey

(I couldn’t resist a cricket image. Every television show should have a big cricket showdown.)

[image source]

millionsmillions: “It’s air-tight satire, particularly because [Teddy] Wayne doesn’t have to do...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:57:45 -0500

millionsmillions:

“It’s air-tight satire, particularly because [Teddy] Wayne doesn’t have to do much to alter modern-day America — we’re admittedly a bunch of celebrity-sucking vampires, after all, just as so many celebrities jump to bare their necks to us — and as the narrative rings true, the boy Jonny’s forced to mold himself into becomes all the more tragic. He lives a deeply false life, but our complacency in this, whether we’re teeny-boppers or not, lends us that same cheapness. It’s masterfully done, but it does leave us mired in the age-old questions of celebrity and authenticity, wondering what about any of this is new.”

— Elizabeth Minkel,”The Kid Is Alright: On Teddy Wayne’s The Love Song of Jonny Valentine.”

[An excerpt!]

And here’s the aforementioned piece on “The Love...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 16:58:15 -0500

And here’s the aforementioned piece on “The Love Song of Jonny Valentine” by Teddy Wayne, over at The Millions. I’m actually pretty proud of this one:

http://www.themillions.com/2013/02/the-kid-is-alright-on-teddy-waynes-the-love-song-of-jonny-valentine.html

Please check out if you are interested in any of the following:

Justin Bieber
Pretend Justin Bieber
One Direction
The Rolling Stones
Simon Cowell
corporate Urban Outfitters indie pop
Justin Timberlake
questions of fame v. authenticity v. talent v. branding v. ?
really good books about pop culture

And 10 points to whoever made that super amazing image.

READ THEM ALL. (the title poem is particularly relevant to my...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 14:46:18 -0500

READ THEM ALL.

(the title poem is particularly relevant to my life right now)

spencermadsen: photo of a page from a million bears taken by...

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:40:23 -0500

spencermadsen:

photo of a page from a million bears taken by james brown

Right now I’m working on a piece about Teddy Wayne’s...

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:49:52 -0500

Right now I’m working on a piece about Teddy Wayne’s new novel, “The Love Song of Jonny Valentine,” which comes out a week from today. Jonny Valentine is, as you might’ve guessed from the pic, partly a stand-in for Justin Bieber—tween star, nearly-overnight YouTube discovery, managed by his mother (in the novel, Jane, who’s clearly got a lot of issues of her own), and overwhelmingly well-packaged and well-marketed for pop consumption. I wasn’t expecting to find the book so incredibly…sad. No, like, in a good way. It’s utterly heartbreaking.

I won’t say much more here—I’ve got an entire essay about it in the works, after all—but I wanted to share the sort of passage that I think makes this book fantastic. The child star narrative provides a great allegory for adolescent confusion on a whole, and Jonny’s got these beautiful rambling internal monologues in which the stuff he parrots from his adult entourage and the feelings he’s trying to sort out get all jumbled, like here, doing a national morning show spot in his hometown, St. Louis, which has hasn’t been back to since jetting to superstardom (“The Secret Land of Zenon” is the video game that occupies much of Jonny’s free time and his analogies):

“Everything happens for a reason,” Robin said.

Something about the TV-host smile on her face made me want to be like, No, it doesn’t, that’s the coastal way of believing in God without actually believing in him, and it’s a stupid thing morons like Mrs. Warfield tell themselves when bad things happen so they feel better about it, that’s why The Secret Land of Zenon is so good, things happen and no one’s keeping track of if it’s for a reason or not, experience points either come or they don’t and you can never totally predict why and sometimes it’s the opposite of what makes sense, like Jane can’t sing and my father probably can’t but I was born with a perfect voice from good luck, and if Jane had gotten an abortion then everyone here would be watching someone else get interviewed right now, or if YouTube hadn’t been invented I might never have been discovered and would be a normal kid in St. Louis who was the star of his school choir but nothing else and Luann Phelps wouldn’t have a crush on me, and there’s a girl in the audience in a wheelchair and if you think that happened for a reason, you have a fucked-up idea of why things happen.

“Totally,” I said.

[image source]

"GOOD AT AWKWARDNESS"

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:44:00 -0500

Sometimes I write fiction, and sometimes I work on fiction to procrastinate from nonfiction, which feels like a relatively healthy decision? Sort of. I’m doing it now, on my day off, tucked up in a corner of this coffee shop that is also a vintage furniture store so all the tables and chairs are really cute but annoyingly wobbly. Stupid, I know. I live in Brooklyn.

A little while back my writing group kind of fell into this non-writing slump—I mean, I imagine most of us were writing independently, but we weren’t getting our acts together in time for meetings, so we just drank and enjoyed each others’ company and played Bananagrams. But then we started doing writing exercises, normal stuff at first, until one of our ranks suggested this exercise that was basically therapy in disguise, in which all the other members of your group take a few minutes to shout out things about your work—threads and themes, any pattern that might be discernible. Some people were really into the idea; I, unsurprisingly, very loudly protested against it. But when my turn came and I began to transcribe everything that was being said, well, HAHAHA why had I ever protested? It was fantastic. I thought I’d share a few observations with you here. I set about half my stories here and half in the UK, FYI:

about characters that are dissatisfied with situations and have made compromises and feel dirty and contaminated and need to break out of something—’maybe I’ll do this and it’ll let me escape’—but there really is no escape for most of them
background sadness in England—in all of the stories, actually
unkempt, gritty realism
best cringeworthy sex scenes!
GOOD AT AWKWARDNESS
“your sex is like beautifully awkward and cringeworthy”
sex is never positive or negative—it’s part of everything: money, power, social interaction
sense of a social system that is taken for granted: most American writers don’t feel that hierarchical structure and feel the need to introdcue that, but I overlay that knowledge and expectation—you have to exist in this world and deal with the pre-set divisions
like ‘Upstairs Downstairs’—even American stories

The takeaway: my sex scenes are extraordinarily awkward and everyone wants something from someone else, and all of my characters are imbued with a sense of class-bound despair. I’m not being sarcastic here: this is perfect.

At least it’s pretty? (Bryant Park on my way home from...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:34:11 -0500

At least it’s pretty?

(Bryant Park on my way home from work this evening)

I’m taking solace in the fact that it’s currently 3° F in my hometown.

millionsmillions: Introducing The Millions Originals and An...

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 12:45:10 -0500

millionsmillions:

Introducing The Millions Originals and An Excerpt of Our First eBook, ‘Epic Fail’

The Millions turns 10 years old this year, and to celebrate, we’re trying something new. The Millions Originals will give our talented writers a platform to publish as ebooks longer, magazine-quality pieces that will explore a variety of unusual and interesting topics. They cost just $1.99 and provide a jolt of entertainment that we hope will be worth much more than the price. Our ebooks will generally run about 15,000 words (a good deal longer than most magazine articles, but not nearly as long as a book). So please, hop on over here to learn a bit more about our first title and to buy it from the ebookstore of your choice. Or, read on for an excerpt, if you still need convincing.

To kick off our new series, Dublin-based staff writer Mark O’Connell has penned an exploration of the Internet-era obsession with terrible art – bad YouTube pop songs, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and that endless stream of “Worst Things Ever” that invades your inboxes, newsfeeds, and Twitter streams. What, exactly, draws us to these futile attempts at making songs, movies, and art? What are the essential ingredients that render a ridiculous failure sublime? More importantly, what does our seemingly insatiable appetite say about our aesthetic impulses? In setting out to answer these questions, O’Connell uncovers the historical context for our affinity for terrible art, tracing it back to Shakespeare and discovering the early 20th-century novelist who was dinner-party fodder for C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT of The Millions‘ first ebook original, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever. – C. Max Magee, editor, The Millions

HOORAY FOR MARK!!

And the award for the most adorable surprise gift ever goes...

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 13:47:00 -0500

And the award for the most adorable surprise gift ever goes to…