Spring 2007 Contributors

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Derik Badman blogs at MadInkBeard and writes reviews for various publications.

Dave Beckerman attended NYU Graduate Film School, worked in the film business as a screenwriter for ten years, and eventually returned to still photography, which he had begun as a child in the Bronx. His work has recently appeared in the Black and White Spider Awards Book: The World’s Greatest Black and White Photographers, 2007. Visit his website here.

Scott Esposito’s writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Chattahoochee Review, Boldtype, and the Rain Taxi Review of Books, among others. He blogs at Conversational Reading.

Dan Green’s criticism has been published in AGNI, Context, and The Antioch Review. He blogs at The Reading Experience.

John Allan Harrison lives and reads in Maine.

Contributing editor Barrett Hathcock’s work has appeared in the Colorado Review, the MacGuffin Reader, and the Birmingham Weekly. Read his essay “Howdy Neighbor” from issue 6 here.

Megan Keane is a yoga instructor living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Edie Meidav is the author of The Far Field, named one of the Best Books of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times. Her most recent novel, Crawl Space, was awarded Bard College’s Bard Fiction Prize in 2005.

The holder of a master’s degree in English from the University of Virginia, Brien Michael lives in Berkeley, CA.

Dave Munger’s work has appeared in Seed magazine. He blogs at Cognitive Daily.

Ken Stout has shown his paintings internationally, including exhibits at the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the Butler Museum, with solo shows at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, the Goldstrom Gallery in New York City, and the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock. He has received numerous awards, including the NEA/Mid-America Arts Alliance Fellowship in Painting, is represented by the McMurtrey Gallery in Houston, and has a website.

Matthew Tiffany recently earned a masters degree in counseling and writes reviews for various publications. Visit his literature blog here.

Contributing editor Elizabeth Wadell’s work can be read previous issues, including an essay on Frank Bidart a review of the book Hungry Planet.

Scott Bryan Wilson’s work has appeared in the Rain Taxi Review of Books and many other journals. He lives in New York City.

Responses to this article

The Constant Conversation

Anything West of Chicago Is Not Necessary

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.

Who’s Bad?

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.

Vollmann Interview

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.”

Margaret Atwood + hockey movie musical = Heaven

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 NYRB

New issue of the New York Review of Books is out, with Colm Tóibín on exile lit.

More from the NBCC Awards

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.

Broom of the System Gets Cover Makeover, Plus One Cover I Love and One I Hate

DFW's latest cover makeover, plus a great-looking cover and a really not-so-great-looking cover.

Rereading Wallace Stevens

Since buying The Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens at City Lights, I’ve been rereading many Stevens poems and trying to understand it from a more mature perspective. Last time I read a vast amount of Stevens was when I was 22 for a class on Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and Marianne Moore. With fifteen years [...]

Best Translated Book Award 2010

The 2010 Best Translated Book Awards were announced last night at Idlewild Books, Manhattan. The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, translated by Dalya Bilu won the fiction award, and the poetry award went to Elena Fanailova for The Russian Version, translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler. Check out the [...]

NBCCA

The National Book Critics Circle Award is announcing their winners tonight. The diversity of their nominations, from the better known (such as Hilary Mantel and Mary Karr) to the less mainstream (such as Rachel Zucker and Eula Biss), makes the blog entries on the nominees an interesting read. I added Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with [...]

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Bonus Articles

Every Morpheme Counts: The Sam Lipsyte Interview

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.

PROPOSAL FOR TALK ON “GRANTS, PROPOSALS, AND QUERIES,” TO BE DELIVERED AT THE 2010 AWP CONFERENCE, THURSDAY, APRIL 8, COLORADO CONVENTION CENTER, STREET LEVEL, ROOM 203, 9:00 AM

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."

Lectures from the Argentine Master: Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges

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 [...]

The So-Called Other Europe: Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon

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 [...]

Field Guides to Elsewhere: How We Read Languages We Don’t Read

“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 [...]

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