In an era marked by the short story’s loss of cultural heft, Charles D’Abrosio’s collection of stories makes that loss seem tragic. The name of this short story collection by Charles D’Abrosio is taken from the title story, in which an immigrant wife can’t pronounce the word refrigerator, so she calls it the dead fish […]
The LA Times, one of the three remaining newspapers publishing a special book review pullout section, is planning on downsizing the space in half. One half of the pullout will be devoted to opinion, the other half to books. Now it’s not as though the LA Times book review section was exceptionally good before, (they […]
Wendell Berry has a new short story in the March edition of Harpers Magazine. It’s called “The Requirement”, and it’s not available online yet. Although usually I tend to like Berry’s essays more than his fiction, I’m beginning to appreciate (some) of his fiction more. This one hit me particularly well, probably because I can […]
As Edward Champion and the Literary Saloon have already noted, Sam Tanenhaus makes a buffoon out of himself in an interview in Queens College Knightly News. In response to the question of whether he reads lit blogs, Tanenhaus says: “No, I don’t. I don’t really have time. Other people here do and they’ll tell me […]
Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and winner of the Man Booker Prize, has been writing political nonfiction for the last ten years, but now is working on a new novel. (hat tip to Laila Lalami) Now that all the discussion on Wizard of the Crow is over, check out the three […]
The longtime readers of this blog know that I like the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, and I especially like his novel Blindness. In the book, an epidemic of blindness sweeps the nation, and a band of travelers have to survive under quarantine. However, the sequel, Seeing, published in English in 2006, garnered rather unfavorable reviews, […]
Steve Erickson has a new website, and I have to say it matches his eccentric writing (The main page picture changes with each load, but I like the swastika one). Also, the Cal Arts faculty page (the school that publishes the literary journal Black Clock, which Erickson edits) says Erickson’s new novel Zeroville is coming […]
Okay, so in defiance to that whole Write-A-Novel-In-A-Month thing with the acronym that nobody can ever remember, I’m signing up for the mission proposed by Syntax of Things: A short story in a month. And I’m not jumping on this bandwagon because back in Novel-Writing-Month-NaNoWrMoTg-WrSlKillmyself I actually thought I could write a chunk of a […]
I know I’m a bit late with some of these, but they’ve been hovering on my mind while I’ve been trying to get this new site up and running. Check them out: J. Robert Lennon has a new blog called Ward Six, which he writes with his wife. Check out his post on Five Chapters […]
So Malcolm Jones, the book critic of Newsweek, candidly admitted that he hadn’t finished Vikram Chandra’s 928 page novel Sacred Games. If he were simply reading for pleasure, this wouldn’t be a problem, but he happened to have the temerity to write a review about a book he hadn’t finished. No, no, no. This is […]
