Speaking of short stories, I just won the Third Coast fiction competition, judged by Ann Beattie. Many thanks to the editors of that fine journal and to the wonderful Ann Beattie. The story, “Fatu Ma Futi,” in which a young man volunteering in Samoa becomes fascinated by a Samoan cross-dresser, will be published in the […]
I know this hardly constitutes a groundbreaking study, but in the last year I've detected an uptick in the number of searches coming to my website looking for pirated books. It's not because I'm writing more about piracy issues — the search terms are different from words of mine. So far I've noticed three different […]
Love the prose of Alyson Hagy. Her third collection, Ghosts of Wyoming, just came out from Graywolf Press, and has eight stories highlighting the hardscrabble lives of the rural natives, past and present. The stories were originally published in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Five Points, and Idaho Review (Every collection I read, I see where the stories […]
In the last few years, many prestigious literary journals have moved to a two-tier model for publishing: they maintain their print journal for the big-name authors, and create an online space to publish emerging authors. Granta now has their "New Voices" program, started last year, which publishes new authors online every month. American Short Fiction has […]
Issue #3 of Electric Literature just came out, featuring Aimee Bender and Rick Moody, among others. I got my hands on a copy of the print journal, and I’m glad to see that a journal that touts itself as being available on so many digital platforms hasn’t let the print side languish. It’s a beautiful […]
I’ve been a subscriber to a number of journals over the years. Recently, I’ve subscribed to Image, but the last issue in particular disappointed me. It only had a single story — disappointing in itself — but even more disappointing was that the story wasn’t any good. The author was Scott Russell Sanders, whose grandiose […]
I count myself as one of the many ardent fans of Ted Conover, ever since he wrote Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing, which is a gritty nonfiction story about prison life. And to think once the prison authorities turned him down for access, he simply got a job as a prison guard. He got to write about […]
The movie is called “$9.99.” No, that’s not the price for streaming it, or some price cross-over from the e-book world. And it’s based on Etgar Keret’s short stories. And it’s stop-motion animation. Fun, fun, fun. It’ll actually sell for $24.98 when it comes out on February 23rd. Here’s the trailer:
Bookslut pointed me toward the Economist blog “More Intelligent Life,” where in a post titled “Salinger’s Spoiled Children” Bradley Freedman describes a friend’s pilgrimage to see JD Salinger and present him with a manifesto demanding more fiction. Freedman, as you can infer from the title of this post, disagrees with his friend’s impulse: But instead of […]
Equator Books is shutting their doors after nearly six years here in Los Angeles. The knowledge that independent bookstores seem to be shutting down with metronomic frequency does not reduce the sorrow of the occasion. Since Equator specialized in collectible books, it was a virtual shrine to the book-as-object. I remember browsing through in awe […]
