I just moved the RSS feed for BookFox from Feedburner to Google. The transition should be seamless, but if you have problems, let me know — johnmattfox AT hotmail DOT com If you don’t follow BookFox via RSS, please join by clicking the button in the upper left hand column, or, if you prefer, insert […]
I heard on NPR yesterday that one of the sticking points in the stimulus package is funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). $50 million of the $819 billion (.06 %) is slated for the organization. Here’s the debate: Jack Kingston, a Republican Representative from Georgia, advocated shifting the proposed NEA funding into […]
Some postmodern fun: a novel told entirely in the second person. I’m hearing echoes of “Upon a Winter’s Night a Traveler…” I like what Harper Perennial is doing with their fifty-two stories site that publishes a new short story weekly — it’s all a build-up to the summer, when they’re releasing six new short story […]
Daniyal Mueenuddin just made a pit-stop here in L.A. to promote his collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” which has been making waves. I couldn’t go to the reading at Vromans because I had to teach a night class of creative nonfiction, but I’m going to catch up with him soon. So until then, I […]
The first YouTube literary journal. And probably not the last. The disadvantages (of which the article lists few) and the advantages of authors branding themselves. If your sorrow for John Updike’s passing has not abated yet, you could always buy a T-shirt with his face on it from Flatmancrooked, a site which besides selling Updike-themed […]
R.I.P. John Updike. You will be missed. Already a vast number of voices are singing your praises in eulogies. You are the symbol of an era in American writing. But at least you leave us with one last collection of short stories that will come out after you’ve gone: My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
In the spirit of Harper’s Readings, I offer this trivia about literary journals. Below are the journals that use the adjective “oldest” as a badge of pride. And no — despite readers’ assumptions that only one journal would use the term “oldest,” with others using only “older” or “not as young as most,” quite a […]
The Guardian on Barack Obama’s skill with narrative, as well as his fascination with Marilynn Robison’s Gilead. Not content with listing the top ten or a hundred books, The Guardian lists their top 1,000,000 books (okay, top 1,000 — but still, I feel bludgeoned). Lev Grossman in Time Magazine weighs in on the state of […]
Jim Shepard is a funny, funny man. He kept us all in stitches, even as he bemoaned the lack of importance of short stories in popular culture and the way that Europeans value writers much more than Americans do. He read from his new, as-yet-unpublished story “Minotaur,” about the black world in the military (no, […]
For all my readers who are writers, click on the link to the left under Pages: Journals Accepting Electronic Submissions. I found there wasn’t a good list up anywhere, and decided to make my own. It’s a list which will change fairly frequently, but I’ll try to keep it updated.
