Weekend Reads

Reads. For the weekend.

Up ahead, the articles I’ve enjoyed this week and the books I’m gonna read this Shabbos:

• Self Care by Leigh Stein

  My wonderful very important sister sent me a copy of this and I have decided to eschew the rest of my library books for this weekend because I deserve a little deliciousness.

• Knight v Snail, from the British Library’s medieval manuscripts blog

  There are a lot of illustrations of knights fighting snails in illuminated manuscripts. Why? Unclear. Seriously, we don’t actually know. Thanks to a TIL (today I learned) on Reddit, I discovered this lovely little tidbit and now I’m trying to imagine what the equivalent of this would be in the margins of Megillat Esther.

• Five Architecturally Significant Homes for Sale Around Chicago, by Whet Moser in Chicago Magazine

  You must see the Byzantine Room in the tower of this Lake Forest house for sale. Seriously:

  

• Sixfold

  If you are unfamiliar with the world of literary magazines, here’s they operate: you either request work from an author (=solicited work), usually a known author, or you have submissions from the hoi polloi (=unsolicited work). When you have open submissions, someone has to read them all. It’s called the SLUSH PILE. Very dignified, I know. I was a fiction reader for TriQuarterly during my time at Northwestern, and you’re put in a cohort with a few other readers and then you just get batches and batches of stories that you all vote on whether to consider or not.

  I discovered Sixfold by way of Erika Dreifus’s recommendations, and what Sixfold does is make the slush pile part of the process. Every writer who submits a story then votes, in three rounds of six, on eighteen other stories. One emerges victorious. It’s an interesting change from other submission processes (STARE AT THE “IN-PROGRESS” LABEL IN SUBMITTABLE UNTIL YOUR EYES CROSS), but I didn’t realize I’d be doing it at the same time as NaNoWriMo, which I fully did not intend to do this year. I’m curious how this will turn out, though. If you’re a writer, give it a shot!