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.” […]
The Roberto Bolano 2666 reviews have been gushing praise. What’s more, most reviewers recognize (and I agree) that 2666 is more ambitious and a greater achievement than The Savage Detectives. Which is why GQ wrote that it is the only 1,100 page book they’ll ever tell you to read. Adam Kirsch in Slate: Jonathan Lethem […]
Apologies for neglecting the right sidebar updating what I’m reading. I’ve been reading a spate of novels (some of them very very small, you know, like 2666), and so have not been adding to my short story collection reading. But don’t worry — I’ve jumped back in the fray with some small press/university titles, four […]
VQR just announced the winner of its review contest, in which reviewers under 30 submitted a review of a book published in 2008. Congrats to Emily Wilkinson, for her review of “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective” by Kate Summerscale. And, I might add, she […]
More about Yaddo (a book!) Unusual calls for submissions gathered on the blog of Hayden’s Ferry Review. While I wouldn’t say that a call for Death and Dying is all that unusual, the YouTube literary journal is rather strange. Literary Rejections on Display offers up rather lengthy rejections, complete with details about grammar and pacing, […]
For the November Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan writes a lengthy article — “Why I Blog” — musing on the nature of blogs. Most of what he says is well phrased and crafted and shows a prolonged thoughtfulness about the function and nature of blogs, although much of it, upon further analysis, seems rather familiar. But […]
