On the occasion of Elmore Leonard‘s new book, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, The Guardian has commissioned the sage advice of other career fiction authors, with entertaining results. Some get specific, like panning the online timesuck (sorry!) — Zadie Smith’s suggestion to “work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet” is echoed by Jonathan Franzen’s sentiment that “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.” Others spout general maxims, such as David Hare’s “No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.”

Click through for some of our favorites, and see if you can spot the parallels (and contradictions) to the writers’ own work.

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Though the creative output of John Hughes had slowed to a crawl in the decade preceding his death in August at age 59, the iconic director’s alter ego JL Hudson wasn’t taking to retirement quite so easily. Penning screenplays, essays, and fiction for his own amusement, some of his later writing — imbued with the same irreverent, sly but tender narrative quality as his film work — saw the light of day as a series called Very, Very Short Stories (some only four brief paragraphs in length). Excerpts after the jump.

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Valentine’s Day is still days away, but we’re already growing nauseous from the saccharine sweet candy hearts, over-sized cards, and plush animals lurking every which way we turn. Puppy love is overrated. We prefer lying, plotting, and scheming drama — at least when it comes to fictional romance.

Whether your V-Day plans involve romantic candlelight or Voodoo pins, we think you’ll enjoy our top ten list of literary cheaters. These fictional guys and girls have gotten away with everything from murder to statutory rape, yet oddly enough, have still felt the love from our back pocket.

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Newcomer lit mag Electric Literature wowed us with its first issue last summer; the periodical has since released a second issue featuring writers-we-love Lydia Davis and Pasha Malla, plus an animated video series to boot. Expanding on its ethos of bringing literary geekdom back to pop culture, Electric Literature engages readers old and new with outreach into other art forms and across multiple platforms. Peep artist Jonathan Ashley’s animation, taken from a single sentence out of Stephen O’Connor’s epic story in the current issue (also excerpted after the jump).

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New Zealand’s got a literacy rate of 99.0%, so the nation must be doing something right. Maybe that something is fancy schmancy ad spots for the national book council. Andersen M Studio designed this two-minute stop-motion animation film from paper cutouts of books, set to a voiceover narrating Going West by Maurice Gee. It’s a little creepy, a lot dramatic, and very cool. Next steps? State mandated reading hour, please.

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There are a million suggested reading lists out there, especially now that it’s the end of the year/decade/life as we know it. So how’s an aspiring literary hipster to know which books are most important in terms of street cred and general knowing-it-all-ness? We decided to go straight to the source, and to that end, we’ve collected a few of our favorite and most knowledgeable lit-hipsters’ own hit lists for your cred-building convenience.

Most of the books and stories suggested here are completely awesome, and we’re pretty confident that these people know what they’re talking about (most of them create some not-too-shabby literature themselves), so we suggest that the anti-hipsters among you might do well to read on too. After all, we mean hipster in the good way (this time).

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Steampunk has been a surprisingly pervasive trend for the past couple of years. It seems to pop up everywhere and it fascinates us — after all, it’s only a delicious mixture of literature, fashion, history and nerdery, some of the world’s best things. According to Google Trends, the first blips of steampunk activity on the web surfaced in 2005, but nothing the least bit significant started happening until 2007, when there was a sudden upsurge in interest. Since then, the trend — as a design aesthetic, as a cultural reaction, as a concept —  has been invading movies, videogames, and hugely influencing certain branches of the DIY movement (just check out Etsy.)

So after hearing the news of the continued struggle of the world’s first steampunk bar (!!) to get a liquor license, we thought we’d offer a little moral support by taking a look at the evolution of steampunk — and how it led us, perhaps inevitably, to a bar in Brooklyn. Check out our timeline and find out where to get steamdrunk after the jump.

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It has recently come to our attention that the first book in Lemony Snicket’s disastrous series A Series of Unfortunate Events has been made available online — cover to cover. At the moment, most of the books available for free and complete online reading are classics, and as such are really only useful to English majors who need to search for keywords when writing last minute term papers, so we think this is pretty rad.

We like Lemony Snicket because we know who he really is, and we also like him because he put his book on the internet. Read it here — it’s set up in pages style, not like those bogus online “books” you have to read like they’re one long Word document. And while we’re on the topic, check out our other picks for good online reading — your own personally curated internet library from your friends at Flavorpill, so you can read and g-chat and pretend to be working all at the same time.

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It’s not enough to just be awesome at one thing anymore. More and more artists are multitasking, and we’re seeing a particular amount of crossover between the somewhat unlikely genres of music and literature. But wait — aren’t musicians supposed to be outgoing egomaniacs and aren’t writers supposed to be tweedy shut-ins? Well, the writer/musician isn’t exactly a new trend — remember Tarantula, Dylan’s stream-of-consciousness book of prose-poetry? And don’t forget that Leonard Cohen was actually a writer first. So maybe there’s something to this whole writer turned rock star thing. Here are some multitaskers who make us feel bad about ourselves when we lie around the house all Sunday.

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So we’ve heard from Martin Scorsese on the scariest Halloween movies, scoped a roundup of the campiest horror films ever made, and reminisced about beloved/reviled ’80s slasher flicks. The Wall Street Journal brought it back old school yesterday with a reminder that literature can be just as unsettling, especially when writer Shirley Jackson is concerned. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the seminal horror classic The Haunting of Hill House; after the jump, we add our two cents about another Jackson pre-Halloween favorite. Read More »