Brian Evenson, the director of Brown University’s MFA program and an excellent writer (I gave love to his collection Fugue State), recently finished reading a wheelbarrow full of MFA applications. He saw plenty of mistakes, and handed out some free tips on Facebook. With his permission, I reprint his advice here. Tips for MFA Applications by Brian Evenson Now that […]
Elizabeth Costello, a character in the eponymous novel by J.M. Coetzee, on the purpose of the novel and how it compares to history: “The novel, the traditional novel, she goes on to say, is an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time, to understand how it comes about that some fellow being, […]
Marilynne Robinson, in her latest collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, explores how to create a character: For me, at least, writing consists very largely of exploring intuition. A character is really the sense of a character, embodied, attired, and given voice as he or she seems to require. Where does this […]
This is the way that Paul Elie, in an essay in the New York Times, describes the state of faith in novels: “Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.” I’d call what Paul […]
“Many years later, when he had become famous — extremely famous, truth be told — Jed would be asked numerous times what it meant, in his eyes, to be an artist. He would find nothing very interesting or original to say, except one thing, which he would consequently repeat in each interview: to be an […]
Among the many literary podcasts eking out hardscrabble lives, the Book Fight podcast has won my heart. God knows I’ve listened to a spate of book podcasters, some of them talking about the wrong books and some of them talking about the right books but doing so drearily and some of them with voices nasally enough to […]
Emma Straub on late blooming writers: The other glorious, inspiring truth is that some people are naturally late bloomers. Leonard Cohen didn’t release his first album until he was 32. Julia Child didn’t move to Paris until she was 36, and she didn’t get her famous television show until she was 51. Wallace Stevens didn’t publish any poems until he was […]
The venerable Atlantic offered a list of the best 25 book covers of the year. Exclusively for your viewing pleasure, I’ve pulled together some of the worst book covers. Enjoy. 1. Police cars in space? That’s killer national security. 2. This cover definitely makes me want to buy. 3. Want to learn how to publish […]
Cheap, neurotic writers throughout the globe took to the streets on Friday night to protest austerity measures at Duotrope, the website that catalogues fiction markets. Spurred by the news that Duotrope was going to wall off its fiction listings to paid subscribers only, writers protested in the way that only writers can — a few […]
Antoine Wilson, author of the newly released novel Panorama City, was gracious enough to answer interview questions via email for BookFox. Wilson’s previous novel “The Interloper” was fantastic, and he is a sterling member of the Los Angeles literary community, in addition to being a really nice guy (at least at the literary parties where […]
