Dear Writers who post resumes/bios with “Pushcart Nominated”: Stop. You’re embarrassing the literary community. You’re embarrassing yourself. Because let’s do the math: Duotrope has 3,500 active literary journals. Let’s assume half of those submit to the Pushcart Prize. So 1,800 journals each nominating 6 stories/poetry apiece = 10,800 nominations a year. Multiplied by the past […]
Very depressed to hear that Jeanne Leiby, editor of the Southern Review and former editor of the Florida Review, has died in a car crash. She was far too young. AP has a few more details in this stub. Remarkably, her wikipedia page has already been updated to reflect the date of her passing. She had […]
Last week, Galleycat offered a list of things to do instead of getting an MFA. They were very sensible and proper and, well, dull. So I’d like to add a few of my own. You got to see the world. You have to experience what it’s like to have $1.20 in Rio after being ripped […]
The Los Angeles Review of Books is launching today, after many backroom deals, alcoholic drinks and diatribes on the robust yet underrepresented L.A. literary scene. I’m glad to finally see the project come to fruition, because I’ve been hearing rumors for years. It’s not the full site (which you can see a mock-up if you […]
I’m going to retire my longstanding page that lists journals that accept online submissions (to your left). Why? It’s virtually impossible to keep up, seeing as how journals are flocking to online submissions. It would probably be easier by now to have a list of journals that don’t accept online submissions. If by this point, […]
Doesn’t the title look weird? It felt weird to type. For so many years I’ve been going to UCLA for the LA Times Festival of Books, but this year the location has been switched to my alma mater. Glad as I am to have USC host the event, I do have reservations about the campus. […]
I was surfing through old book reviews and came across a widely repeated quote from James Wood (in a review of The Corrections) describing contemporary American fiction: “Curiously arrested books that know a thousand different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in Detroit! […]
In the Huffington Post, Anis Shivani published a take-down of the NYTBR, provocatively titled “The Death of the New York Times Book Review: And Why That Is a Good Thing for Books.” One overarching criticism Shivani makes, at least judging by his language, is that the NYTBR is too elite. He uses the word “elite” […]
I love Forgotten Bookmarks, which offers pictures of fascinating objects stowed away inside books. First-name-only Michael, the proprietor, is a rare and antique bookseller who runs through five- to six-hundred books a day and shares the treasures between their pages. Highlights include an honest-to-God saw blade, (did the reader consider the book sharp or in need […]
This documentary about how to make a book sounds chock full of sobering market realities. It's a German film (though not exclusively in subtitles) following Gerhard Steidl, one of the few publishers running their own printing press. Fortunately, it's not about how to write a book (now that would be a dull documentary), but covers everything that […]
