Thursday 9 August 2012

Next Literature

You've been wondering what's coming next, haven't you? And you're in luck, because now there's Litflow to explain. Kicked off by some people at the Hildesheim creative writing programme, it's a magazine and a thinktank for next literature™. Utopian thinking about literary formats of the future, with (I think) a conference coming up in Berlin in September, bringing together creative and industry types from America and Germany including the inevitable but good Katrin Passig and top publishing boss Elisabeth Ruge. The magazine is not entirely free from sarcasm.

I read the magazine, which is in German only despite the English title and tags, and it left me feeling old and unexciting, and a little bit like I wasn't getting some big, big joke that everyone else is laughing at. And also that I just don't have enough free time to explore next literature™. But the German Federal Cultural Foundation is paying so it must be, you know, a serious undertaking of some kind.

On the plus side, Litflow is a zillion miles away from all those tiresome fetishist photos of mouldy old books you see on every other literature-related website in Germany. If you read German you should go and take a look for yourself, if only for the brilliant take-down of that book-scented perfume I deliberately haven't told you about here.




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