This season, a love of literature might seem vestigial, escapist. Moby-Dick won’t feed the Darfur orphans; Anna Karenina won’t hasten ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. These books merely delight us, nothing more. But in The Irrelevant English Teacher, J. Mitchell Morse argues that there is nothing mere about delight.
Hey, fiction writers! What are you doing on Saturday, November 15th? If you spend the day writing, you can help raise money for Dzanc, a unique non-profit independent press established (in their own words) “to not only publish great books, but to work nationally in set communities to provide writing workshops and year round programs for students and adults alike.” Read more about the Dzanc Writer in Residency Programs (DWIRPS) and The Dzanc Prize, two of many ways this press connects writing and publishing with community service and educational outreach. Want to read more about the event itself? Go here. […]
Apostrophe Cast, a bi-weekly online reading series, currently features work by FWR contributor Celeste Ng. Listen to Celeste read one of her fantastic short stories, “We Are Not Strangers.” Then read an off-beat interview with the author to find out why this one-time Best Easter Bonnet champion avoids hairless cats and wishes you’d call her Ish.
Agent Jessica Faust from BookEnds breaks down in this post how she reads each of the following: query letters, proposals, requested manuscripts, revised manuscripts from clients, and books for pleasure. This is helpful reading for anyone preparing agent submissions: Often when reading proposals I’m distracted. I’m reading at home, at night, and dinner is on, or the TV is on, or there is just chaos. A good three chapters is going to make that chaos disappear. Like most readers I don’t have the opportunity for a peaceful few hours to sit quietly and read. Instead I’m counting on the book […]
Andrea Walker shares choice tidbits from Munro’s session at the New Yorker Festival earlier this month: ‘Things you may not know about Alice Munro’: She sees her stories visually before they become words. She often starts with an image of some incident and the people involved—a sense of some action, or some effect that the characters have created on each other. She doesn’t know at that stage exactly what’s happened to them or what they’re saying to each other, only that these people somehow belong in the story together. Now brace yourself: “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories” was […]
Check out this interview with Junot Diaz (Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) on NYU/Slate’s Open Book series. Watch the full hour-long exchange or a 10-minute excerpt on Slate V.
Author Shannon Hale blogs about moral and message in fiction: Is the book powerful in and of itself, the carrier of a message that can change a reader’s life? Or is it just a story, and the reader is powerful by deciding if and how the book might change her life?
FWR readers should check out Book Balloon, a great online community of
Sadie Jones’s exciting debut is saturated in the same high color as the embracing couple on its cover. Simultaneously tender and urgent, claustrophobic and wistful, The Outcast tells the story of Lewis Aldridge, a tortured romantic figure in the Heathcliff tradition, and of the repressive postwar English society that drives him to self-destruction.
Kathryn forwarded me this Washington Post piece by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Here’s an excerpt: I prefer to discuss politics through my novels, but I am truly dismayed these days. Twice last week alone, speakers at McCain-Palin rallies have referred to Sen. Barack Obama, with unveiled scorn, as Barack Hussein Obama…What I find most unconscionable is the refusal of the McCain-Palin tandem to publicly condemn the cries of “traitor,” “liar,” “terrorist” and (worst of all) “kill him!” that could be heard at recent rallies. McCain is perfectly capable of telling hecklers off. […]
