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The Sit List: 5 events in Berkeley to end the week Laugh with comedians, drink wine with the novelist Jonathan Lethem, learn about Berkeley’s food history, declutter your closet, watch a documentary about maternal mental health. Image: Lockdown Comedy We’re entered into a new era. It’s time to celebrate the change by laughing at a comedy special, joining a wine and novel pairing, perusing a Berkeley food history exhibit, decluttering your closet, and watching a documentary about maternal mental health.  LOCKDOWN COMEDY Laugh your way into a new chapter of U.S. history. They say laughte...

Don’t feel sorry for writers who “have to” teach.

A little more than halfway into Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest comes a chapter titled “Postapocalyptic and Dystopian Stories”, in which the screenwriter protagonist and his movie-producer friend debate the appeal of such tales while name-checking a panoply of authors and titles – Vonnegut, King, Atwood, Walter Tevis, Philip K. Dick, George R. Stewart, Walter M. Miller, Emily St. John Mandel, Russell Hoban, and especially Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s The Road “bugs the fuck out of me,” complains the producer, calling it “postapocalyptic comfort food” and arguing that, far from...

John le Carré was no lowbrow writer – he changed the course of English literature   Genre fiction was once disparaged as stuff to read idly on the train. Today’s most innovative fiction owes the late novelist a great deal The man behind the mask: David Cornwell Here’s how John le Carré introduces his most famous creation, George Smiley, in the first chapter of his first novel, Call For The Dead:  When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary. When she left him two years lat...

Unfit magazines use Thinkerbeat Reader to “chart… the authors that we thought did really well with a story submission.” But these are not stories they bought – six days ago they tweeted out a link to the list of stories they rejected. The page had names, titles, and a rating between one and five stars. One problem: none of the authors had given them permission to do so. SFWA issued a statement on Facebook warning about the practices in March. Nine months later, Longshot Press is now trying to discredit SFWA in its post “A Clear Bias at the SFWA”. Why does the SFWA post fa...