I just moved the RSS feed for BookFox from Feedburner to Google. The transition should be seamless, but if you have problems, let me know — johnmattfox AT hotmail DOT com If you don’t follow BookFox via RSS, please join by clicking the button in the upper left hand column, or, if you prefer, insert […]
I heard on NPR yesterday that one of the sticking points in the stimulus package is funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). $50 million of the $819 billion (.06 %) is slated for the organization. Here’s the debate: Jack Kingston, a Republican Representative from Georgia, advocated shifting the proposed NEA funding into […]
Some postmodern fun: a novel told entirely in the second person. I’m hearing echoes of “Upon a Winter’s Night a Traveler…” I like what Harper Perennial is doing with their fifty-two stories site that publishes a new short story weekly — it’s all a build-up to the summer, when they’re releasing six new short story […]
Daniyal Mueenuddin just made a pit-stop here in L.A. to promote his collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” which has been making waves. I couldn’t go to the reading at Vromans because I had to teach a night class of creative nonfiction, but I’m going to catch up with him soon. So until then, I […]
The first YouTube literary journal. And probably not the last. The disadvantages (of which the article lists few) and the advantages of authors branding themselves. If your sorrow for John Updike’s passing has not abated yet, you could always buy a T-shirt with his face on it from Flatmancrooked, a site which besides selling Updike-themed […]
R.I.P. John Updike. You will be missed. Already a vast number of voices are singing your praises in eulogies. You are the symbol of an era in American writing. But at least you leave us with one last collection of short stories that will come out after you’ve gone: My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
The Guardian on Barack Obama’s skill with narrative, as well as his fascination with Marilynn Robison’s Gilead. Not content with listing the top ten or a hundred books, The Guardian lists their top 1,000,000 books (okay, top 1,000 — but still, I feel bludgeoned). Lev Grossman in Time Magazine weighs in on the state of […]
As of July 2019, 80 of the top 100 journals accept online submissions. Of those 80, 43 charge reading fees. I would strongly advise you to submit first to the journals without submission fees, submit reluctantly to those that charge fees, and never submit to anyone that charges more than $3 (unless it’s a contest […]
I used to enjoy the LA Weekly on a regular basis — consult it for book readings, check out the interviews of literary folk and/or original fiction in its pages, find out how local politicians were squandering money and cultivating corruption. But alas, as Marc Cooper describes in great detail in LA Weekly: The Autopsy […]
The New York Times has an lively, quote-filled and entertaining article in the recently created genre of Depress-Lit: All terrible news about the publishing industry, all the time. It’s “Puttin’ Off the Ritz: The New Austerity in Publishing.” What amused me were the quotes. The first, from the literary agent Amanda Urban, who represents Cormac […]
