Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2009

Shop Talk |

NBCC Awards

by Anne Stameshkin

The National Book Critics Circle announced 2008’s award winners on Thursday: Fiction: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, trans. by Natasha Wimmer (FSG) Poetry: Sleeping It Off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler (FSG) and Half the World in Light by Juan Felipe Herrera (U of Arizona Pr) Criticism: Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer (U of Chicago Pr) Biography: The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French (Knopf) Autobiography: My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar (Algonquin) Nonfiction: […]


Essays |

AWP: Hope Takes Flight in the Basement of the Hilton

At first, I didn’t care too much about the economic troubles of Wall Streeters, or people living off their investments, or people with things called “401ks.” Let them give up their limos and learn how to take the bus; let them eat at the table next to me at Ali Baba’s Kebab House. But then the publishing world followed. Has the prospect of getting a literary novel published plunged from very unlikely to totally unlikely to absolutely-forget-about-it-impossible with each drop of the Dow Jones average? Or is there hope?


Shop Talk |

TED talks: writers on writing

by Anne Stameshkin

Celeste just turned me on to TED — or Technology, Entertainment, Design; on their website, this organization offers videos of more than 200 lectures by VIPs from a wide swath of industries and arts. Here’s a sampling of talks by writers: – Dave Eggers describes his experience working with 826 Valencia, encouraging creative people everywhere to get involved with public schools. – Amy Tan explores “where creativity is hiding.” – Isabel Allende discusses passion, creativity, and definitions of feminism. – Elizabeth Gilbert gives a lecture on “genius” and creativity.


Reviews |

In the Convent of Little Flowers, by Indu Sundaresan

by Lee Thomas

Indu Sundaresan’s fourth book and first story collection, In the Convent of Little Flowers, contains India’s multitudes, all in relationships of opposition – men vs. women, traditional vs. new, haves vs. have-nots. Throughout these nine stories, Sundaresan cultivates empathy for her characters and their individual anguish at straddling those great divides.


Shop Talk |

more (and more and more) e-reader and Kindle links

by Anne Stameshkin

In the latest The Quarterly Conversation, William Patrick Wend’s “Intro to E-Lit: How Electronic Literature Makes Printed Literature Richer” discusses N. Katherine Hayles’ book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary and defends e-publishing. Slate‘s Farhad Manjoo loves the Kindle but fears it’s bad news for the current publishing industry. Booksquare argues that the text-to-speech verdict, supposedly a win by Authors Guild (who aggressively pursued this issue), might (ironically) benefit Amazon the most in the end. Check out her earlier post on e-book pricing. The latest Kindle news is at Kindlebuzz, and folks are talking about nothing else at KindleBoards.




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