For all you belated shoppers out there, and for all two of you not already sickened by the blizzard of Best-Of lists, here’s my picks for the best short stories of 2008. I read a good chunk of them — most that I’ve read are in my sidebar, though I’ve neglected to add a few. […]
Bookslut offers five books for the Best Foreign Fiction of 2008. 2666 makes the cut, unsurprisingly, as well as Metropole, by Ferenc Karinthy. The Millions has their annual “Year in Reading.” If you want a slightly different take on the Fiction 2008 lists, try the Financial Times book suggestions. (via) The TLS has authors suggest […]
Want to win a free short story collection? New York Times listed its 100 Notable Books of the Year. Out of 42 fiction titles, 9 were short story collections — a ratio that’s not too shabby, in my book. Also, the ratio’s virtually identical to last year, which listed 8 short story collections. All short […]
I like N+1, both specifically and generally. Specifically in that usually I enjoy the articles infused with the scathing wit that could earn any writer the moniker of Captain Contrarian. Generally in that I support the idea of having a publication that isn’t afraid to upend convention wisdom and challenge the cultural sages. (Those rhetorically […]
It’s that time of year again: the shortlist of the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award has been announced. It’s just in time for the Holiday season, in case you’re interested in reading (or getting an annoying co-worker to read) badly written sex scenes. Or, at the very least, it will provide amusing online […]
All you MFAers out there (or MAers in fiction, or MPWers, or whatever else your degree is called if you studied creative writing at the graduate level), go take the MFA survey at Our Stories. There are seventeen sections, but it won’t take you that much time. If nothing else, it helps you to reflect […]
Canadian author Julie Curwin has won the 2008 Commonwealth prize for her short story “World Backwards.”(via) And be amazed (jealous?) by this: New Brunswick-born Curwin began writing only two years ago, and is now working on a collection of short stories with medical themes. Rachel Resnick, who did epic interviews for BookFox a few months […]
Sidenote: I wrote this post a few weeks ago, but it didn’t make it into my 2666 week. So now that Bolano mania is in full swing, I’m posting it. Bolano despised most other Latin American writers, often insulting them using humdingers like these: Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with […]
Congrats to Nam Le for scoring the Dylan Thomas prize — 60,000 pounds is quite a serious chunk of change. Also, props to the Thomas prize administrators for repeatedly honoring short story writers — the 2006 winner, Rachel Trezise, was also a short story writer.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about a new system that ranks humanities journals. Predictably enough, scholars and editors are up in arms: A large-scale, multinational attempt in Europe to rank humanities journals has set off a revolt. In a protest letter, some journal editors have called it “a dangerous and misguided exercise.” […]
