A meditation on grief, writing colonies, and summer blockbusters: Yaddo itself was born from grief, that great leveler. The colony became a playground for creative minds because Katrina Trask, the matriarch of the mansion and its well-maintained grounds, lost all of her children in infancy or childhood and she needed something to do with her […]
Where are you when you speak to your audience? Harold Brodkey says each author has a particular location from where he speaks to his audience — fireplace, bar, outdoors, drawing room. “A kind of writing solely meant for a public forum is often less interesting than writing where the writer has invented the public space […]
A wonderful description from Sartre of what literature should be, on par with Kafka’s famous pronouncement about the ax breaking the ice: “We did not want to delight our public with its superiority to a dead world—we wanted to take it by the throat. Let every character be a trap, let the reader be caught […]
In the latest issue of Poets and Writers, Paige Wheeler, founder of the literary agency Folio, explains her company’s approach to maximizing revenue for writers: “Folio’s motto, emblazoned across its website, is “thinking beyond the page,” and, as Wheeler explains, Folio is positioning itself for the next wave of publishing by looking at its clients […]
Saw this Redbox for books at the American Library Association (ALA) conference this weekend. An automated vending machine to check out books? Sounds like the future of libraries to me.
I’m going to review stories from the latest issue of the Santa Monica Review (Spring 2012). This is the first review. Rhoda Huffey’s “Rima” is a wicked satire of fundamentalist Christian culture, skipping from spinster missionaries to the archeology of Noah’s ark. The story is surreal not only because of its brevity but because of […]
This is not your typical list of fatherhood books. You’re not going to find any of those cleverly titled books like “My Boys Can Swim!” or anything with “emergency” or “idiot” in the title. What you will find is a carefully curated list that represents my knowledge on the subject. Which is, admittedly, limited. Especially […]
storySouth announced its ninth annual list of notable short stories published online. Some of the best online publications that you should watch: Prick of the Spindle, which garnered three notable stories of 2011. Memorious, which I’ve always liked and has great design in addition to interesting stories, got two nods. Phong Nguyen, the fiction editor […]
If you have seen Melancholia by Lars von Trier and know about the writing colony MacDowell, this will be amusing. Otherwise, this will be very, very strange. MACDOWELLANCHOLIA
