The Guardian has an excellent article rounding up all the sites, authors, and publishing groups boycotting Amazon in one form or another. Some remove all links to Amazon; others encourage readers to buy books from elsewhere. It's this last tactic, encouraged by John Scalzi, which I think will be the most helpful. Instead of limiting […]
It’s 10:00 p.m. here in Los Angeles, on the sixth day of the Amazonian extortion against Macmillan. Counting the days is starting to seem like some kind of foreign hostage crisis where the newscasters count out the length of imprisonment. As many people have pointed out, Amazon doesn’t have the slightest clue of the definition […]
Ted Genoways, editor of VQR, wrote an impassioned call for action in Mother Jones. Essentially, he laments the decline of the literary journal and the explosion of creative writing programs and writers who don't read. About those writers who don't read: "Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this […]
Over at The Millions, there's some great journalism going on — an interview with a book pirate called "The Real Caterpillar." One of the most interesting sections is at the end: Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the […]
Three books have been nominated by The Story Prize: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin Drift by Victoria Patterson Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower Well, I guessed the winner last year, so I’ll take another stab for 2010. It seems the two frontrunners would be Mueenuddin and Tower, both of whom […]
I’ve become disenchanted with book reviews. At one point in my life, I think I relied upon them more. Maybe I trusted the taste and judgment of the seasoned reviewers. Now, I feel a bad review has no predictive power as to whether or not I’ll like a book. A good review actually has more […]
Happy 2010, everyone. And get ready for a new spate of short fiction. We got some doozies forthcoming. Here are ten upcoming short story collections I’m looking forward to this year. Sam Shepard, Day out of Days (January) Amy Bloom, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (January) Stories linked by the motif of love. […]
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone. BookFox will be taking a break for a few weeks. Looking back over this year in reading, I discovered I read about 60 books — half short story collections and half novels, with a couple of nonfiction books thrown in. This is right about average for my reading […]
So here are my picks for best short prescription medication online no prescription story collections of the decade. If you want another take, check out the A.V. Club’s choices — we got a few in common, but a whole lot of differences. If you think I missed one, you’re wrong. Probably. But if you insist […]
“The Size of the World” by Joan Silber (Norton) In 2004, Joan Silber published a book of stories, “Ideas of Heaven,” that introduced a new way of structuring a collection. A character or other element in one story, would take center stage in the next, with the last story connecting back to the first, completing […]
