An impressive line-up for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Other than the usual suspects of local Southern California authors, we have some heavyweights: Andre Aciman Mark Danielewski Dave Eggers Bret Easton Ellis Yann Martel Maile Meloy Colson Whitehead Elizabeth Crane Congrats to the organizers for putting together such a great lineup. Also, […]
Ingo Schulze’s short story collection “One More Story” was preceded by “33 Moments of Happiness,” a collection about St. Petersberg, and the novel “New Lives.” Critics consider Schulze the voice of post-unification Germany, a rather ironic mantle since Schulze slept through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. His latest collection, “One More Story,” […]
The Atlantic is going to start publishing fiction again. So no more of those newstand-only summer fiction issues (which were good, though, especially the 2008 one that highlighted emerging authors). Instead, a supplement will accompany the May issue that will include half a dozen short stories and — obligatory for all American magazines, for every […]
I’ve been loving the latest issue of Granta. If you want a sneak peak, read Daniel Alarcon’s “Life Among the Pirates,” which offers a Peruvian view on book piracy. Apparently, pirates earn more money than the publishers do, and sometimes have spies in foreign publishing houses that steal translations. Plus, the police can’t mop it […]
A torrent of new online fiction came out this week. Kyle Minor has the short story "The Truth and All Its Ugly" out on Harper Collins Fifty-Two stories. You all know I have a man-crush on Minor since reading his sizzling debut collection, "In the Devil's Territory," so hoof it on over there. Five Chapters […]
Speaking of short stories, I just won the Third Coast fiction competition, judged by Ann Beattie. Many thanks to the editors of that fine journal and to the wonderful Ann Beattie. The story, “Fatu Ma Futi,” in which a young man volunteering in Samoa becomes fascinated by a Samoan cross-dresser, will be published in the […]
I know this hardly constitutes a groundbreaking study, but in the last year I've detected an uptick in the number of searches coming to my website looking for pirated books. It's not because I'm writing more about piracy issues — the search terms are different from words of mine. So far I've noticed three different […]
Love the prose of Alyson Hagy. Her third collection, Ghosts of Wyoming, just came out from Graywolf Press, and has eight stories highlighting the hardscrabble lives of the rural natives, past and present. The stories were originally published in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Five Points, and Idaho Review (Every collection I read, I see where the stories […]
I’ve been a subscriber to a number of journals over the years. Recently, I’ve subscribed to Image, but the last issue in particular disappointed me. It only had a single story — disappointing in itself — but even more disappointing was that the story wasn’t any good. The author was Scott Russell Sanders, whose grandiose […]
I count myself as one of the many ardent fans of Ted Conover, ever since he wrote Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing, which is a gritty nonfiction story about prison life. And to think once the prison authorities turned him down for access, he simply got a job as a prison guard. He got to write about […]
