Excited for the AWP conference, only a few short weeks away. Authors! Readings! Schmoozing! Dancing! (Yes, there is the legendary dance party, happening … nightly). A whole host of literary heavyweights will be there, but as I’ve discovered from years past, the most exciting part of AWP is not the famous writers but the rank […]
The most painful situation the writers of this Velveeta commercial could come up with was … a male book club. That's right: talking about books with other men is equivalent to torture. Of course, the sidekicks are willing to suffer cheap medicine online through such torture to win the Velveeta prize. But who knows, perhaps […]
Here are the first two sentences of Aimee Bender’s “Bad Return” in One Story #158: “I met Arlene in college, in the freshman dorm. We were not roommates but suite-mates in the corner section of a squat brick house in the center of a small college campus in the middle of Ohio.” Pay attention to […]
In a writing workshop, a friend of mine once criticized Kazuo Ishiguro for his novel “Never Let Me Go,” which my friend claimed was a science fiction novel that refused to embrace its science fiction roots. It’s true that the science fiction conceits in “Never Let Me Go” are largely glossed over. Most of the book […]
Quiz Time: In this J.M. Coetzee novel, a professor interacts with a disadvantaged member of another race during the apartheid in South Africa. If you guessed Disgrace, you can be forgiven. After all, the plot line is identical to this novel written nearly a decade before: Age of Iron. The eerie similarities between the novels gave […]
The new issue of Confrontation is out, issue #110, with cover art by Claudio Bravo (“Red, Rose and Orange Paper”). It’s a timely homage to the recently deceased Chilean painter. Inside the journal are a number of glossy full-color pages showcasing Bravo’s other work. Paul Zimerman’s “Full Remittance,” a kind of anti-Rakolnikovian story, is excellent, […]
Over the last decade the Nobel Prize for Literature has alternated between a proscriptive award and a descriptive one. A proscriptive award takes little known but worthy authors and presents them in a bow and wrapping to the world, telling everyone to read. A descriptive award honors the authors that have, to a large extent, […]
Is a writer merely defined as someone who writes or are there additional qualities required? The way that creative writers use the term Writer, I’ve noticed, is limited to people who write creatively. They say “Writers” and exclude all those people whose expertise is in another field, the people who dip into writing only to […]
In Slate, Scott Kenemore argues that the latest Poets and Writers’ Rankings are a travesty, but his reasoning is self-centered and misleading. Let’s look at why Kenemore thinks that Columbia deserves to be ranked highly (in 2nd place behind Iowa): Because the last rankings had them high. As he says, “A few years ago, U.S. News […]
