John Fox, a most excellent writer I have had the pleasure of teaching over at USC, has kindly invited me to guest blog. Thanks, John! Kudos to him for launching a blog that focuses on the short story form. I have been teaching writing since 1995, and I have always believed that mastering this short […]
Jhumpa Lahiri took the Frank OConnor International Short Story Award outright, bypassing a shortlist. The longlisted authors surely must feel some disappointment that not even a shortlist was announced, because shortlisting can help boost the profile of a short story writer and increase sales. Apparently the judges were so certain they did not want to […]
Since this is a short story blog, I thought I’d write a bit about literary theories of the short story. I should confess that I am not the BookFox, and probably not even worthy of the title BookWeasel. Right there I was going for an animal slightly less smart (and slightly more smarmy) than a […]
So I am playing Trivial Pursuit on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala and find this question: What organ did 500 Iranians offer to sell in order to finance the fatwa against Salman Rushdie? Okay, so you probably got it: their kidneys. But I just found the whole organ-selling angle to be a unique way to fund […]
I visited an art show in Antigua yesterday. It was called “Los Deseparecidos” or “The Disappeared.” Each of the installations focused on a particular heinous act in South or Central America. The disappearances in Argentina, the massacres in Columbia, Pinochet in Chile, the dictatorship in Uruguay, martial law in Venezuala. A video showed two men […]
Hello All, I am currently on a three week trip to Guatemala and thus this post will not have apostrophes or dashes because foreign keyboards have all the symbols mixed up. But posts will continue, from myself and select colleagues, so continue to check back in. As far as my reading adventures down here, I […]
The search engine came in with some doozies this week. In regards to the misdirected ones, I will rescue these poor orphan searches by providing them loving answers. Search: What happened to Swink Magazine? Answer: Good question. Swink was part of a boom in LA literary journals back in 2004, but now has been declared […]
Ever since the post on the Millions last week about DIY literary scenes, I've been considering what makes for a good hip indie literary gathering. Also, I've been thinking about why the indie concert is often so different than a reading and how that distance can be abridged. Let me first share about a literary […]
Entertainment Weekly lists the top 100 books published between 1983 and 2008. It’s idiosyncratic (as any list of this type must be), waffling between pop culture and high-brow, but at least it manages a couple of short story collections: Selected Stories, Alice Munro Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat Pastoralia, George Saunders […]
Conversational Reading has an excellent post exploring the nuances of punctuation and the structure of sentences. To add to the comments on the power of commas to speed up the pace, I would add that Jose Saramago is particularly effective in this technique. Also, I can’t help but recall I once lost an adjunct job […]
