So, every once in a while a friend will toss out a great anecdote, or character, or fully formed story, with the caveat, “Go ahead and use this, because for X reason, I never will.” That’s one kind of leftover I really love, the wisp of an idea with which you can play around, experiment, [...]
NPR’s Marion Winik has called Janice Eidus’s latest novel, The Last Jewish Virgin, “Twilight…with a sense of humor, a brain, and a feminist subtext.” At the Algonquin hotel, Eidus talks with Lauren Hall about paying homage to—and reinventing—the vampire myth; judging a book by its cover; and writing longhand in the mountains of San Miguel de Allende.
“Writers can almost be defined as professional outsiders. It’s part of the job. You often have to step outside of a situation to observe it—to choose the right details—to reshape a mess of events into a narrative.”
Andrew Porter is the author of The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was recently republished by Vintage. Each one of these critically acclaimed stories is beautifully paced and plotted–a veritable nesting box–and full of lovely sentences you’ll want to read aloud just for the pleasure of it.
In this interview, Porter discusses how crafting stories is like editing film; what particular advantages peripheral narrators can afford; and why it’s “completely surreal” to hear actors read from your work.
“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.”
– Simone de Beauvoir
Neela Banerjee talks with Kathryn Ma, the first Asian American to win the Iowa Prize in that contest’s 40-year history. Ma channels rage and its antidote, humor, in her debut collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, which features unapologetically Asian American characters who don’t do any cooking or talking to ghosts.
The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating look at how several writers get down to business–from writing in blue exam books to dressing in character to collage-making. Some highlights:
Orhan Pamuk:
Mr. Pamuk writes by hand, in graph-paper notebooks, filling a page with prose and leaving the adjacent page blank for revisions, which he inserts with [...]
