Over at Papercuts, Dwight Garner reveals that last night Jhumpa Lahiri soared into the number one spot on the New York Times Bestseller list with her collection of short stories, “Unaccustomed Earth.” When’s the last time a short story collection was #1? Glad you asked, because I was willing to guess virtually never, but then […]
Dan over at Emerging Writers Network points out a new trend among literary journals, such as Fence and American Short Fiction, to “pay what you can” for a subscription to their journal. A smart move, I believe. Journals need some kind of marketing to jumpstart their subscription base. How literary journal rejections that take over […]
Just wanted to update the short story collections that should be on your horizon. In addition to the many I listed back in January, there are a couple of heavy-hitters coming out in Fall. First, Annie Proulx has a collection of more Wyoming stories coming out from Scriber in September: “Fine Just the Way It […]
Junot Diaz, who just won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, commenting on life as a celebrity of the short story form: “Being a hot young short-story writer is like being a hot young up-and-coming pastry chef.” Who really knows or cares in the real world?” (Interviewed in Newsweek)
So first we had smoke fiction, which is a short story as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette, and then flash fiction, which can be a lot quicker, and then six-word stories, which is about as short as you can get. But now there’s Txt Lit – not measured in words, but in […]
I’m back up and running now, thanks to a Verizon line for which I’m probably paying too much. But some updates on writing of mine that recently came out: Check out the Spring 2008 Rain Taxi Review of Books, in which I have a review of “Dangerous Laughter” by Steven Millhauser. Sorry, my review’s only […]
Bookslut interviews the editor of One Story. Members of the Society of Slow Readers, take heart! A discussion of another short story turned movie over at Columbia University Press — Eileen Chang’s story “Se, jie,” which was turned into the movie “Lust, Caution.” (via Conversational Reading) A new issue of Bookforum is out, including a […]
Recently, while reading two short story collections — Jim Shepard’s "Like You’d Understand, Anyways" and Tobias Wolff’s "Our Story Begins," — I got the distinct feeling of deja reading. You know, when you come across something and in the first few paragraphs it seems familiar, as if you’ve read it in another life. When it […]
The Tournament of Books is in full swing, including hilarious judges commentary. The fifth annual Millions Writers Award is taking submissions for the best online short story published. Jonathan Safran Foer speaks and people consider him arrogant . . . surprise, surprise, surprise. That’s how I wanted to find him, when I saw him at […]
Maud Newton has a review of Cate Kennedy’s Dark Roots (which I listed in my short story roundup at the beginning of the year) in NYTBR. There’s also a review of Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser, a book which I enjoyed immensely and wrote a review that should come out in the next issue of […]
