I visited an art show in Antigua yesterday. It was called “Los Deseparecidos” or “The Disappeared.” Each of the installations focused on a particular heinous act in South or Central America. The disappearances in Argentina, the massacres in Columbia, Pinochet in Chile, the dictatorship in Uruguay, martial law in Venezuala. A video showed two men […]
Hello All, I am currently on a three week trip to Guatemala and thus this post will not have apostrophes or dashes because foreign keyboards have all the symbols mixed up. But posts will continue, from myself and select colleagues, so continue to check back in. As far as my reading adventures down here, I […]
The search engine came in with some doozies this week. In regards to the misdirected ones, I will rescue these poor orphan searches by providing them loving answers. Search: What happened to Swink Magazine? Answer: Good question. Swink was part of a boom in LA literary journals back in 2004, but now has been declared […]
Conversational Reading has an excellent post exploring the nuances of punctuation and the structure of sentences. To add to the comments on the power of commas to speed up the pace, I would add that Jose Saramago is particularly effective in this technique. Also, I can’t help but recall I once lost an adjunct job […]
The American Scholar offers an article by William Deresiewicz on the Disadvantages of an Elite Education. I particularly liked this excerpt, which describes the patience one must have with poetry: This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, […]
Seth Greenland writes a piece for the LA Times that categorizes the types of author videos — the author-talking-to-camera, a graphic montage that expresses the sense of the book, or an author hanging out in the book’s locations. His own video, promoting “Shining City,” falls into the last category, and it’s hilarious, complete with faux […]
Last year, one of the most interesting nominations for the Booker was a book called “Animal’s People”, written by Indra Sinha, about a boy walking on all fours because of the Bhopal chemical incident. Well, now Indra Sinha is standing behind the work he did on the novel by joining eight other people on a […]
If you want a glance at the trenches of the lit life, check out Lily Hamrick’s ongoing saga of submitting to lit journals, Dispatches from the Query Wars.
This heralds the beginning of a new feature here on BookFox, one in which I field search engine queries that have come to my site. (For those of you who don’t know, yes, I can see what people typed into Google in order to find my site). Most of the searches are directed correctly to […]
Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy points us toward this video of Mary Gaitskill on “Front Porch,” which is a rising star among the online-only lit journals. I’ve been reading a new quarterly from Britain called The Drawbridge. Each issue is themed (Memory, Risk, Rumour) and sports such luminaries as Terry Eagleton, J.G. Ballard, and Etgar […]
