Take a day off to write next week. Or maybe just an afternoon. Either way, you can disconnect for a few hours, put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, and in the process help raise money for Dzanc Books. Each year Dzanc holds a Write-a-Thon to raise money for their Writer-in-Residence Program and the [...]

Chicago friends, don’t miss Sharon Pomerantz’s reading this Thursday at Women and Children First at 7:30pm. Sharon will be reading from her debut novel, Rich Boy. Beginning in the 1970s in a working-class Jewish neighborhood and stretching to the halls of power in Reagan-era Manhattan and beyond, the book chronicles four decades in the life [...]

NYC-based writers: on Sunday, December 6 at 5 PM, gather for a free and awesome Largehearted Lit event at the Knitting Factory (361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn).
We at FWR are big fans of (and frequent linkers to) David Gutowski’s LargeheartedBoy.com, a music-lit-culture website whose Book Notes column gives established and emerging authors the chance to create [...]

Life in Russia, said author Aleksander Snegirev, at Housing Works’ September 21 Rasskazy event, is uncomfortable, but always interesting. So, too, are the stories in this plump new anthology from Tin House: Arkady Babchenko’s beleaguered soldier returns to Chechnya a page away from German Sadulaev’s lyrical descriptions of Chechnya’s devastated countryside. The binding is a veritable trench across which both narrators peek at each other warily.

NYC-based writers, head to Brooklyn’s newest bookstore, Fort Greene’s Greenlight Books (686 Fulton St., at S. Portland), tonight (Monday, November 23) at 7:30 PM for a special event featuring local authors and the editor of Mentors, Muses, and Monsters, a book that we at FWR are excited to read.
This is also the bookstore’s first [...]

NYC-based writers: On Tuesday, September 22 at 7 PM, head to the Rattlestick Theater to see a one-night only reading of Mulletfingers: Short Plays on Hands and Fingers by FWR contributor Brian Bartels. I was lucky enough to attend another night of Brian’s hilarious yet thought-provoking plays, Versus, in March, and the short pieces [...]

The Southeast Review’s Writing Regimen is a 30-day writing project for poets, essayists, and fiction writers who crave some motivation and structure for a concentrated period of time. Another session (for adults) starts on October 1. (If you’re interested in the Young Writers’ Regimen, the next one begins August 31.)
For $15, writers will get the [...]

a href=”http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/07/14/infinite_summer/index.html”>Slate reports on Infintesummer.org, a reading-group/support group combo for those grieving David Foster Wallace’s death and those wanting to tackle his masterwork. The challenge:
Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages1 ÷ 92 days = 75 pages [...]

NY-based (or visiting) writers:
More short story love, this time with actors: Symphony Space presents “Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story,” in which “spellbinding short stories by established and emerging writers take on a new life when they are performed by stars of the stage and screen.”
Hosted by Isaiah Sheffer, performances [...]

I’ll be attending this production on Friday; Joyce fans, look for my adaptation review on FWR–or better yet, join me for the show. You can read the short story “Araby” online here, and below is information from Dixon Place’s press release about the chamber musical:

THE *NEW* DIXON PLACE PROUDLY PRESENTS
In the tradition of Jacques Brel, [...]