A wonderful description from Sartre of what literature should be, on par with Kafka’s famous pronouncement about the ax breaking the ice: “We did not want to delight our public with its superiority to a dead world—we wanted to take it by the throat. Let every character be a trap, let the reader be caught […]
In the latest issue of Poets and Writers, Paige Wheeler, founder of the literary agency Folio, explains her company’s approach to maximizing revenue for writers: “Folio’s motto, emblazoned across its website, is “thinking beyond the page,” and, as Wheeler explains, Folio is positioning itself for the next wave of publishing by looking at its clients […]
Saw this Redbox for books at the American Library Association (ALA) conference this weekend. An automated vending machine to check out books? Sounds like the future of libraries to me.
I’m going to review stories from the latest issue of the Santa Monica Review (Spring 2012). This is the first review. Rhoda Huffey’s “Rima” is a wicked satire of fundamentalist Christian culture, skipping from spinster missionaries to the archeology of Noah’s ark. The story is surreal not only because of its brevity but because of […]
This is not your typical list of fatherhood books. You’re not going to find any of those cleverly titled books like “My Boys Can Swim!” or anything with “emergency” or “idiot” in the title. What you will find is a carefully curated list that represents my knowledge on the subject. Which is, admittedly, limited. Especially […]
storySouth announced its ninth annual list of notable short stories published online. Some of the best online publications that you should watch: Prick of the Spindle, which garnered three notable stories of 2011. Memorious, which I’ve always liked and has great design in addition to interesting stories, got two nods. Phong Nguyen, the fiction editor […]
If you have seen Melancholia by Lars von Trier and know about the writing colony MacDowell, this will be amusing. Otherwise, this will be very, very strange. MACDOWELLANCHOLIA
Gunter Grass’ anti-Israel poem has caused such an outcry that Benjamin Netanyahu has already condemned it, along with hundreds of other intellectuals. The poem has only been published in German but The Guardian has translated and excerpted a few lines. The most thorough dismantling of Grass came from Anshel Pfeffer, writing in the Israeli newspaper […]
This is going to be the biggest children’s book since “Go the F*ck to Sleep”:
