Canadian author Julie Curwin has won the 2008 Commonwealth prize for her short story “World Backwards.”(via) And be amazed (jealous?) by this: New Brunswick-born Curwin began writing only two years ago, and is now working on a collection of short stories with medical themes. Rachel Resnick, who did epic interviews for BookFox a few months […]
Sidenote: I wrote this post a few weeks ago, but it didn’t make it into my 2666 week. So now that Bolano mania is in full swing, I’m posting it. Bolano despised most other Latin American writers, often insulting them using humdingers like these: Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with […]
Congrats to Nam Le for scoring the Dylan Thomas prize — 60,000 pounds is quite a serious chunk of change. Also, props to the Thomas prize administrators for repeatedly honoring short story writers — the 2006 winner, Rachel Trezise, was also a short story writer.
The Roberto Bolano 2666 reviews have been gushing praise. What’s more, most reviewers recognize (and I agree) that 2666 is more ambitious and a greater achievement than The Savage Detectives. Which is why GQ wrote that it is the only 1,100 page book they’ll ever tell you to read. Adam Kirsch in Slate: Jonathan Lethem […]
More about Yaddo (a book!) Unusual calls for submissions gathered on the blog of Hayden’s Ferry Review. While I wouldn’t say that a call for Death and Dying is all that unusual, the YouTube literary journal is rather strange. Literary Rejections on Display offers up rather lengthy rejections, complete with details about grammar and pacing, […]
For the November Atlantic Monthly, Andrew Sullivan writes a lengthy article — “Why I Blog” — musing on the nature of blogs. Most of what he says is well phrased and crafted and shows a prolonged thoughtfulness about the function and nature of blogs, although much of it, upon further analysis, seems rather familiar. But […]
I conducted this Nathan Englander interview for the Spring 2008 issue of the Southern California Review, and I’m posting it online now for easier accessibility. If you want the entire text, click the title above or the link at the bottom of this post. Nathan Englander burst onto the literary scene in 1999, when he […]
The New York Times has a great article on an exhibition at the New York Public Library about Yaddo, the artist retreat outside Saratoga Springs in New York. As can be expected whenever Yaddo is discussed, the article veers into the social dimension: John Cheever used to boast that he had enjoyed sex on every […]
In light of the recent meltdown of the financial sector, and with the specter of a global recession looming over our spending habits, it’s an excellent time to examine how the fallout will affect the literary world. There’s been a few articles on this, including this one, “Will Books Be Immune to Global Recession?” Eric […]
Bookninja has a conversation between three critics on The Savage Detectives. BOMB magazine has an interview with Roberto Bolano, conducted through email back in 2001. The Nation has a personal story about poetic skirmishes during the time of Bolano. Biography and analysis of his major works at the New York Review of Books. Geometry of […]
