Lit-link roundup: Pulitzer Do-Over, 50 Short Fictions at Wigleaf, Nick Antosca, Blake Butler, Alix Ohlin, TMN contest, Baffler fundraiser and more.
Keywords: bisexual narrator, “sexual suspect,” Vermont, amateur theatrical society, AIDS
“You could say these stories are meant to shock, but we all know that we live in an unshockable age.”
This week’s links include the luck of artistic success, DFW and Don DeLillo, Teju Cole’s Small Fates and more.
A lazy Monday, so I just wanted to let you know that Jackie Corley and friends have now provided you with 10 years of Word Riot. We say: Here’s to 10 more years.
“The beautiful thing about memoir is also the thing that makes it the most appalling: It’s actually you on the page.”
Today would have been Jack Kerouac’s 90th birthday.
A TED talk by Susan Cain on “The Power of Introverts”: Cain is the author of a book on this topic, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking * “When Vladimir Nabokov started teaching Russian literature at Wellesley College in 1944, he was frustrated by the lack of an adequate [...]
What can a short story do that a novel can’t do? Find out…
The Zen of Steve Jobs is a brief, creative re-imagining of Jobs’ relationship with the non-traditional San Francisco Zen teacher Kobun Chino Otogawa.
Sh*t Book Reviewers Say (Video by Ron Charles) Crime Pays: Jo Nesbø Talks about Killing Harry Hole and the Best Job in the World (Robert Birnbaum interview at The Millions) Jonathan Franzen, The Art of Fiction No. 207 (The Paris Review Interview, Winter 2010) Circus Love “I opened the door to the bite of marijuana [...]
Vaclev Havel has died. David Remnick composed a top-ten reading list of Vaclev Havel and Beyond — non-fiction prose writers such as Vaclav Havel who “lived, and wrote, within the truth.”Also gone and not to be forgotten: Christopher Hitchens. Robert Birnbaum says “Good Bye, Hitch.”According to Galleycat, “The Best Gift You Can Give a Writer [...]
1. The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka. Who wouldn’t want a Buddha in the attic, watching over them from up above, dusting off the old high school yearbook and keeping the mice at bay by radiating eternal bliss? To top it off, this Buddha was a National Book Award finalist. 2. Train Dreams: [...]
Joyce Carol Oates appeared on The Bat Segundo Show.Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs topped Amazon’s Bestselling Books of 2011.But, not everyone is buying from Amazon.Robert Birnbaum on Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (Verso), “a heart-warming anthology of the voices involved in this surprising grassroots movement.”And locally: Asheville-area writers have a new year-round, twice-monthly writing [...]
“Is our world less real than an unreal world? And if our sense of reality has fundamentally changed, how does that affect the stories we tell?” Bookforum reviews Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.The New York Times on the genesis of The New Inquiry, “a scrappy online journal and roving clubhouse that functions as an Intellectuals Anonymous of [...]
Newsflash: The future is boring, says Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story.“Comedies end in marriage, tragedies in death. Otherwise they aren’t so different,” says the protagonist of Siri Hustvedt‘s “exuberant” new novel, The Summer Without Men.Only posting two stories is kinda lame, we admit. We’ll work on blogging better in the future.
Did you hear the news? Obama — er, Osama — was killed last night. (See facepalm above.) Terrorism died with him, of course.To celebrate mankind’s final and complete triumph over evil, we’re going to Walt Disney World. Actually, according to Guernica, that might not be the best idea…Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: Each [...]
Martin Amis hails the peerless intelligence and rhetorical ingenuity of his exceptional friend, Christopher Hitchens: “He’s one of the most terrifying rhetoricians the world has seen.”Robert Ebert finally wins New Yorker cartoon caption contest. Also, on Ebert’s blog, he wonders, “Does anyone want to be ‘well-read’?”Galleycat offers Free Samples of the 2011 Hugo Award NomineesNew [...]
The Morning News got it right: Shortly after winning the 2011 Tournament of Books, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.Robert Birnbaum doesn’t understand why no American publisher had the intelligence to publish Joe Bageant’s Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir.Should green-minded readers switch to e-books?Godless in Tumourville: Great, [...]
Everybody’s talking about the new Francisco Goldman novel. As Michele Filgate Tweeted, “So happy to see all the Twitter love for Francisco Goldman’s SAY HER NAME. Everyone should read SHN. It’s extraordinarily good.”We found an excerpt from Say Her Name, which begins: “Aura died on July 25, 2007. I went back to Mexico for the [...]
It’s been almost a year. We’re happy to be back.A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan just won The Morning News 2011 Tournament of Books, edging Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.HTMLGIANT asks: Is David Foster Wallace the American Roberto Bolano?This Saturday, April 9th is Dzanc Day, aka National Workshop Day.On Identity Theory: we posted a [...]
Having watched two full seasons of Mad Men on DVD this month, I’ve had old-school advertising on the brain pretty much nonstop lately. Season two of the hit AMC drama about Madison Avenue frequently intersects the Catholic Church with the advertising industry, which got me thinking about the role of consumer culture in the perception [...]
The PEN American Center announced its Beyond Margins Award winners.Lorrie Moore has a new book out. Here’s an old interview with her from The Believer.Gretchen Rubin offers 13 Tips For Actually Getting Some Writing Done.The Positivity Blog reveals Ernest Hemingway’s Top 9 Words of Wisdom.For those of you suffering from writer’s block, Writer’s Digest has [...]
Are today’s students required, when they make bad choices at school, to copy pages out of the dictionary? This question assumes, of course, that schools continue to make use of dictionaries in their paper form at all. Apparently, school libraries have been shrinking in size since 1995, and why would these embattled librarians choose actual [...]
Over at Fictionaut’s Blog, they have started a new series featuring places where writers write. The lovely Lauren Cerand is the most recent writer to be featured.Speaking of Lauren, you can see her talk and many other publishing professionals/authors over at Book Expo America’s Blip website. Lots of good stuff there, including a conversation between [...]
President, Mrs. Obama To Be Honorary Chairs of National Book Festival Ninth Annual Event on Sept. 26 Will Draw Book-Lovers to the National Mall (Vocus/PRWEB ) May 26, 2009 — President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will serve as Honorary Chairs of the 2009 National Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library [...]
Kevin Sampsell of Future Tense Press recently noted that Gary Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way is being reissued by Calamari Press. Sampsell wrote, “This is my favorite book ever and a book that should never go out of print.”Former Identity Theory music editor Ross Simonini put it like this in his 2005 Believer interview [...]
