Scott Bryan Wilson’s work has appeared in Rain Taxi and many others. He lives in New York City. Derik Badman blogs at MadInkBeard and writes reviews for various publications. He works as a librarian in Pennsylvania. Theodore McDermott’s essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in CONTEXT, the Review of
Contemporary Fiction, and online at Words Without Borders. He plays in the band Dogleg. Beth Wadell studied English at UC Berkeley and is now a freelance writer living in Oakland, CA. Brien Michael lives in Berkeley, CA. Terri Saul’s artwork has been exhibited at galleries nationowide, most recently in San Francisco’s Bucheon Gallery. She lives in Berkeley, CA. Barrett Hathcock lives in Birmingham, Ala., where he works as a copyeditor. He has had other work appear in the Colorado Review, the MacGuffin, and the Birmingham Weekly. Scott Esposito’s writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Chattahoochee Review, and Boldtype, among others. He lives in Oakland, CA and blogs at Conversational Reading. Katie Wadell is coauthor of a forthcoming book on Berkeley bohemians. She lives in Chicago. Matthew Tiffany recently earned a masters degree in counseling and writes reviews for various publications. He lives in Maine with his wife and daughter and blogs here. Megan Keane is a yoga instructor living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Conversation with Ben Spivey, editor for Warm Milk Press, a publisher of handmade chapbooks.
As noted on the Europa Editions website, Italian author Valerio Manfredi has a U.S. tour lined up. Nice to see this happening for Manfredi, what with all these do-it-yourself author tours going on during the recession.
Now this is why I love Borges.
With all due respect, I think the answer is pretty clear–it’ll help their books sell.
Andrew Seal argues that “Chicago and New York are to U.S. fiction what Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are to the Russians. Sorry, Boston. Sorry, L.A. Sorry, D.C. Sorry, San Fran. Sorry, the South. You have your claims, no doubt, but they are as the claims of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, or Gogol.” Discuss.
Phelan goes on to say, "There will, I’m sure, be no consensus about what constitutes badness or whether it belongs to the book, the reader, the situation of reading, all of the above, or none of the above," though he's almost wrong there. The list is pretty varied, from the morally-bankrupt to the so-bad-it's-good varieties, though generally the harshest judgments come against fussy stylists and purple prose. Cormac McCarthy gets singled out, by name and illustration, multiple times.
Wherein we learn that Imperial hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves and “Vollmann was exceptionally gracious as both host and interview subject, quite generous with his whiskey and his time.”
In some of the best news ever, Margaret Atwood is going to have a cameo in a movie musical about hockey. Seriously. I am — what is the word? – giddy. Don’t believe me? Atwood discusses it on her blog. Can this news get better? Hell, yes. The movie also stars Olivia Newton-John.
New issue of the New York Review of Books is out, with Colm Tóibín on exile lit.
With jokes from Joyce Carol Oates and "wild imaginings" from 92-year-old winner Diana Athill -- not to mention talk of a sequel from "Wolf Hall" author Hilary Mantel -- this year's NBCC Awards were noteworthy for their celebration of literature by women.
Lipsyte: Well these were the famous classes that he taught and others have written about it. He would kind of perform an amazing monologue for hours that would be a work of art in and of itself, in the way it was constructed in real time and kept pulling threads through and weaving all these elements together, but the content of it would be reflections on writing and art and what it is to be an artist and how one should approach the page. And then at the end of that—and that could go for four or five hours—at the end of that, he would call on students to read from whatever it was they were working on, but normally you wouldn't get too far, because he would stop you probably within a sentence or two and point out all that was false in what you had perpetrated.
In the brief essay that J.C. Hallman will deliver at a panel discussion at the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, Hallman will offer up his own insights as to the nature of this admittedly flawed practice. The essay will be, to some extent, experimental. It will have a self-referential quality, it will aspire to innovation, indeed it will even be accurate to describe it as "meta-," but of course Hallman will use none of these terms, though he would like to. Book proposals are not places for words like innovation and experimentation. Instead, Hallman's essay will be "quirky and fun."
Seven Nights Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Eliot Weinberger). New Directions. $12.95, 128pp. In Seven Nights, the recently re-released collection of lectures-turned-essays originally given in Buenos Aires in 1977, Borges does not discuss the phenomenon of déjà vu. He does, however, speak at great length about nightmares and dreams, which he describes as “a kind of modest [...]
Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon, preface by Zadie Smith. Dalkey Archive Press.448 pp, $15.95. “The great pest of speech is frequency of translation,” Samuel Johnson once wrote, in the preface to his iconic Dictionary of the English Language: No book was ever turned from one language into another without imparting something of its native [...]
“There are, of course, newspapers to keep responsible Americans up to date when trouble looms, and public television or even the History Channel to inform us about the occasional historic battle or archaeological discovery or civil war. What else do we need?” Claudia Roth Pierpont frames her essay on the contemporary Arabic novel, published in [...]