Erotic potential in the creative writing workshop: "Neither may have any intention of breaking the rules, but the idea of breaking them is attractive." The New Yorker's Page Turner blog publishes an essay about Gordon Lish's creative writing workshop methods. The essay, from a forthcoming anthology edited by n+1's Chad Harbach and written by Carla Blumenkranz (who previously profiled Lish), questions the value of writing to appeal, erotically or otherwise, to a lone figure. Read it here.
Book reviews remain, at many publications, a man's world: VIDA completed its annual gender breakdown for book reviewers, and found that bylines once more largely belong to men. Men nabbed four times as many bylines as women at publications like The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. Let's hope the incredibly general byline at The New York Times, "Book Review Byline Tally Shows Gender Disparity," can't simply be recycled next year.
Punctuate the classics! At Vulture, Kathryn Schulz rounds up the top five punctuation marks employed in the interest of vital literature, from the "unbestable economy" of Nabokov's parentheses to a well-timed colon in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.