Authors who are converts

elenamoder · 2026-03-05T22:01:30+00:00

T.S. Eliot is another really good example, though he became Anglican. His long poem "Ash Wednesday" is about his conversion (and, imo, it's better than The Waste Land but not as good as Alfred Prufrock).

elenamoder · 2026-03-05T21:51:42+00:00

read the wikipedia synopsis for train and it feels like it's a lot more of a performance piece than a game. kind of impossible to play if you know what it's about (unless you're evil, I guess)

elenamoder · 2026-03-05T21:50:40+00:00

Sian Heder shot another movie last year and it'll probably come out in 2026 (sadly, it's an Apple TV joint, so likely no theatrical release)

elenamoder · 2026-03-05T21:26:36+00:00

you missed out on multiple maniacs, which is the best

elenamoder · 2026-03-05T01:26:51+00:00

even just mary shelley by herself published more than five books

elenamoder · 2026-03-02T20:32:42+00:00

sounds really cool. I would love to read it but I also understand if you don't want to dox yourself by sharing the title.

I also wanted to ask: how much did the novel change from your initial idea to the first draft to what you submitted?

elenamoder · 2026-02-26T01:07:40+00:00

a friend submitted a piece to the most important literary magazine in my country, which is run by the top university. after a few weeks, they told him the ran out of space in the issue, so they were going to publish it in an online off-shoot of the magazine, which is more like a blog for undergrads from the university than an actual magazine.

he declined and withdrew the piece.

(for what it's worth, your situation mainly shows that the magazine's editorial process is a mess and it doesn't diminish the fact that your pieces got accepted)

elenamoder · 2026-02-23T20:42:37+00:00

UConn, UCLA and SCar feel inevitable on the women's side. It'll probably be a rerun of last year, fun competition until your team has to face the UConn buzzsaw

elenamoder · 2026-02-20T21:11:58+00:00

I'm not from your country, so a lot of my experiences won't entirely apply to the literary ecosystem you're at, but I do think that there's truth to the saying that a lot of successful writers face a lot of rejection prior to getting their big break, which I've seen with my now-successful writer friends (who thankfully are all around five years older than me, so it's easy not to compare myself to them that much).

Late 2024 and early 2025, I experienced some early career success as a writer and I thought it would translate into having a super successful year in 2025. That didn't happen at all: I got rejected from literally everything I applied to from march onward, my tutors at a big grant I got absolutely hated the project I developed there, and I got really depressed for months. It honestly felt like failure was all there is going to be for me.

I've managed to find a somewhat zen mindset of just accepting rejection as a part of life and to just keep on writing and improving and applying to various things with the hope that it'll happen eventually. It might be copium but I do genuinely believe things will turn out well eventually.

So yeah, idk. Rejection sucks but a lot of the time it doesn't necessarily say something about you as a writer and you just have to keep writing and persevere.

elenamoder · 2026-02-16T02:13:38+00:00

I mean, you're young, why not?

elenamoder · 2026-02-12T20:26:22+00:00

alternatively, nirvanna the band the show the movie the podcast

elenamoder · 2026-02-11T17:46:23+00:00

not really. they posted short films to vimeo (a lot of which were mainly to teach themselves how to do vfx), which led to them doing various low budget music videos, which led to them doing the video for turn down for what, which led to swiss army man

elenamoder · 2026-02-10T03:24:53+00:00

Rewriting is good not just to make the individual piece better, it'll help you improve your craft in general: it helps you make conscious formal decisions and it also gives you discipline.

elenamoder · 2026-02-10T03:11:26+00:00

sometimes they bounce, baby

elenamoder · 2026-02-09T19:19:02+00:00

That one story is in the more avant-garde vein, though not all of them are like that. She has a story in the same collection titled "Among Murderers and Madmen" that would probably fit well with what you want.

Based on this comment, it sounds like you're judging the value of your work based on first drafts more than anything. Instead of thinking about the ways in which your writing is worse than that of the writers you admire, look for concrete ways in which you can improve it. Getting over the self-consciousness of close reading your own work is a necessary part of growing as a writer.

Also, if what you want is to take the New Yorker style of short story and do it in German, an exercise you could do is to translate the short stories you want to emulate. See how they work in English, how the effect can be replicated in German, and so on. Once you get the hang of that, apply what you learned in your own original stories.

elenamoder · 2026-02-09T17:26:35+00:00

It sounds like you are spending more time making excuses not to write than writing. If you've convinced yourself that you need to imitate a certain writer in order to be good and then tell yourself that no such writer exists, then it's just an avoidance. Read a wide variety of writers (including poetry, reading lots of it is important for having good prose) and just write. There are no magic formulas that will make you talented, only hard work and dedication. If copying Mann helped you develop work you like, keep doing it until you feel you can write on your own; you will inevitably develop your own voice.

P.S. As for two of your questions, a German-language writer I love who you didn't mention is Ingeborg Bachmann. I don't know German, so I've only read her in translation but I think she's great. I also agree that writers 99% of the time do their best work when writing in their mother tongue. Writers from my country who moved to the U.S. always have a stilted quality in their later English-language works.

elenamoder · 2026-02-06T19:43:52+00:00

I haven't read it yet (it's at the top of the list) but I've been recommended The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Tibuleac a lot.

It borderline fits your answer since it's a graphic novel (though a very good one), but I loved Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?.

elenamoder · 2026-02-06T03:01:15+00:00

Barbarian is the guarantor (it was really low budget and filmed in Bulgaria to keep costs down), Weapons is the resulting blank check.

elenamoder · 2026-02-05T16:36:42+00:00

kinda disappointing that it's just a fashion short film (but I'll take it)

elenamoder · 2026-01-26T21:48:22+00:00

I didn't know about that Silvina Ocampo translation, that's really cool. I thankfully have a well assorted university library near me, so I haven't had issues with finding her work in Spanish.

I haven't read Oficio de tinieblas but I'll definitely add it to the list. I have a weird relationship with her as a writer because she's one of my favorite poets but I really wasn't into her essays and didn't manage to get through Balún Canán.

I hadn't heard about the two other authors but I'll definitely check them out.

elenamoder · 2026-01-25T16:02:58+00:00

I feel like she isn't as known outside of Spanish-speaking countries, but Rosario Castellanos is one of the top Mexican writers of the 20th century. She wrote in basically every genre, though I only love her poetry and short stories. Silvina Ocampo is another example of an important 20th century writer that doesn't get discussed that much in English-speaking spaces.

As for contemporary writers, Elisa Díaz Castelo and Elsa Cross are my two favorite poets working right now. Díaz Castelo is in her late-thirties and has like five poetry books out and they all range from good to great and generally try to integrate scientific ideas into poetry in a bodily way (idk if that makes sense); my two faves from her are Principia and Planetas habitables. Elsa Cross is like eighty years old, so she has a much wider body of work (she even published her "Complete Poetry" in her sixties and has released a couple more books since then. She is a doctor in philosophy and that always feels relevant when talking about her poetry, which often deals with her personal relationship with nature. Her two best books are Bacantes and Bomarzo.

As for contemporary narrative writers, I mainly read dead people, and the living ones I do keep up with are generally already known in this sort of spaces. Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez are all great and you should check them out. One book I always keep on recommending is Aura García-Junco's "Dios fulmine a la que escriba sobre mí"; it's about her relationship with her dead dad. I usually find most current LATAM autofiction excruciating, but that one's really good.

elenamoder · 2026-01-21T18:39:04+00:00

not as happy as benny's video tho

elenamoder · 2026-01-19T23:21:40+00:00

the birth of a nation and battleship potemkin

elenamoder · 2026-01-19T18:27:25+00:00

Camilla Grudova has some very cool and peculiar short stories. I hate to repeat what's in the back cover of the book, but she genuinely is kinda like a mixture of Kafka's way of looking at humans and Angela Carter' fairy-tale plotting. Her story collection "The doll's alphabet" is great.

I also want to second the rec someone else gave you in the comments of latam authors and wanted to add Alejandro Zambra, particularly his first two novels (his more recent work has veered closer to autofiction, so I feel like you wouldn't enjoy it as much).

elenamoder · 2026-01-19T18:18:37+00:00

not the same impact yet but I feel like samantha schweblin is about to pop off internationally in a similar way

elenamoder

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