They don't even have to wear shades...

[caption id="attachment_1257" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum coming to Lit Fest 2010"][/caption]

...but they---Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum---are among the optimists in our cynical art.  And they have reason to be. They'll be in Denver for our Fifth Annual Lit Fest (June 4-19), headlining our panel on the future of books as well as meeting one-on-one with short story writers.  Here's to not letting the literary arts go gently into that sad stew of despair!

This is from a New York Times story on the duo at Electric Literature:

In its first two issues, this year, the magazine showcased some of the country’s best writers — Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard — and created the kind of buzz that is a marketer’s dream. With a debut issue in June and an autumn issue out last week, each consisting of five stories, the magazine has racked up complimentary reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to a blogger on Destructive Anachronism, who wrote, “High quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia could just equal the new model for literature, post-print.”

The brains behind Electric Literature are Andy Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, writers who met in 2006 at Brooklyn College’s M.F.A. program in fiction writing. From an office of roughly 300 square feet in an industrial building between the Dumbo and Fort Greene neighborhoods, they added an iPhone application in July, a month after their first issue.

“Everyone is reading short-form text,” said Mr. Hunter, the editor in chief. “Literature has not made that jump.”

More here.

--aed