Zombie Fiction, Occupy Writers, Not David Foster Wallaces, and More Lit Links

-Flavorwire takes a look at how zombies are taking over popular culture, even literary writers like Colson Whitehead:

His literary use of the undead walkers in his post-apocalyptic vision of New York has led us to consider other high-brow treatments of zombies in pop culture, which have slowly been emerging to varying degrees of success as the gross-out creatures continue to gain popularity.

- Whitehead talks about his zombie novel at The Atlantic:

What do “literary” fiction and “genre” fiction mean to you? Are these terms helpful to you as a writer, or are they just methods of bookstore organization?

They don’t mean anything to me. They’re useful for bookstores, obviously. They’re useful for fans. You can figure out what’s coming out in the same style of other books you like. But as a writer they have no use for me in my day-to-day work experience.

- Occupy Wall Street is growing and spreading, and so is the support from writers at OccupyWriters.com. Check the site out to see the list of writers who support the movement (Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Allison, Russell Banks, Michael Cunningham, Samuel R. Delany, Andre Dubus III, Jennifer Egan, etc.) or to sign up yourself.

- A tumblr of people who kind of look like David Foster Wallace but aren’t. (via The Millions)

- Also at The Millions, Jeffery Eugenides describes how he learned to stop worrying and write The Marriage Plot:

The irony was clear: here I was, cheating on a novel that had once been my mistress! Madeleine’s section just kept getting longer. The longer it got, the more I liked it. Over the course of a painful two weeks, I surgically separated the two manuscripts, taking out three of the characters – Madeleine, Mitchell, and Leonard – and giving them their own book.

- Did you know the noise band TEETH hijacked English novelist Will Self’s Twitter account?

- The Book Bench on writing about soccer.

- At The Paris Review Blog, José Manuel Prieto discusses the North American books he read growing up in Castro’s Cuba:

My friend had imagined, perhaps for a good reason, that you couldn’t find American literature in Cuba, that it was banned because both countries were at more or less declared war, an openly proclaimed enmity. I patiently explained to him that nothing like this ever happened. Mailer’s books and those of many other North American authors were not censured in Cuba; in fact, they were widely sold.

- Lastly, we’ve written before how HBO is gobbling up literary writers for TV adaptation. Now Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, joins the ranks of Sam Lipsyte, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Ames and others.

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