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 […]
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.
