The American Scholar offers an article by William Deresiewicz on the Disadvantages of an Elite Education. I particularly liked this excerpt, which describes the patience one must have with poetry: This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, […]
storySouth has announced its shortlist of online short stories for the Million Writers Award. It’s a very egalitarian selection, with no journal represented twice, and you can read all the stories to vote for your favorite.
Seth Greenland writes a piece for the LA Times that categorizes the types of author videos — the author-talking-to-camera, a graphic montage that expresses the sense of the book, or an author hanging out in the book’s locations. His own video, promoting “Shining City,” falls into the last category, and it’s hilarious, complete with faux […]
Last year, one of the most interesting nominations for the Booker was a book called “Animal’s People”, written by Indra Sinha, about a boy walking on all fours because of the Bhopal chemical incident. Well, now Indra Sinha is standing behind the work he did on the novel by joining eight other people on a […]
If you want a glance at the trenches of the lit life, check out Lily Hamrick’s ongoing saga of submitting to lit journals, Dispatches from the Query Wars.
This heralds the beginning of a new feature here on BookFox, one in which I field search engine queries that have come to my site. (For those of you who don’t know, yes, I can see what people typed into Google in order to find my site). Most of the searches are directed correctly to […]
Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy points us toward this video of Mary Gaitskill on “Front Porch,” which is a rising star among the online-only lit journals. I’ve been reading a new quarterly from Britain called The Drawbridge. Each issue is themed (Memory, Risk, Rumour) and sports such luminaries as Terry Eagleton, J.G. Ballard, and Etgar […]
So I’ve been reading The New Yorker summer fiction edition and also checking out the authors slated for publication in the Atlantic fiction issue, and am struck by the differences. The New Yorker has an all-star line-up of writers, of which I recognized every one: Vladimir Nabokov, Annie Proulx, Mary Gaitskill. Then also some nonfiction […]
So recently I’ve been seeing a number of publications that seek out pre-published material. Think of it as a second chance for your piece to find an audience. Here are three different magazines focusing on round two. Second Writes is a new literary journal specializing in material already published. The publishers of the journal are […]
Interview with Jeanne Leiby from Sam Armstrong on Vimeo. I talked with Jeanne Leiby, editor of the Southern Review, about a weak-kneed and shaky-voiced solicitation of Philip Levine, Bret Lott’s aesthetic changes to the journal, a special issue about the circus, and cultivating the emerging writers of this generation. Interviewer: John Matthew Fox Videographer: Joel […]
