GalleyCat attended the recent National Book Awards and asked attendees for tips on how aspiring writers can survive the recession. The two-minute video includes advice from fiction finalists Bonnie Jo Campbell and Marcel Theroux , YA finalists Rita Williams Garcia and Laini Taylor, poetry finalist Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and nonfiction finalist Sean B. Carroll.
Step 1: Wait for a celebrity to buy your book. Step 2: Be sure the book is in the celebrity’s backseat when he crashes his car in the middle of the night. Step 3: ??? Step 4: PROFIT!
Serial literature might make you think Dickens, but it seems to be all the rage now. This being the 21st century, Twitter is a natural tool for serialization. In conjunction with Electric Literature, Rick Moody published a short story serialized into tweets, with one installment posted every 10 minutes. Reactions to the experiment were decidedly mixed, but its existence speaks to the renewed interest in the serialized fiction. Meanwhile, online lit journal Five Chapters publishes a short story a week, with one part of the story issued each weekday. And Daily Lit allows subscribers to read variety of books–from Tom […]
The old adage is right: you can’t judge a book by its cover. On the other hand, the cover still makes a difference. In a recent New York Times essay, satirist/memoirist Joe Queenan has a startling realization: But in the next room, in the cabinet where I keep my unread books, I was stunned to realize how many of these neglected works were eyesores. Some were bland or ugly because they dated from earlier eras or because they came from England. Particularly ghastly was the 1951 Modern Library hardcover edition of Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” which looks like a trash-bagged […]
So you didn’t win the auction for Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter. (Ahem–if you did, we know a great literary site that you could support as well!) For everyone else without a spare $254,500, we offer this interview with McCarthy in theWall Street Journal, available online for free. In the wide-ranging conversation, McCarthy discusses the film adaptation of his novel The Road, how his relationship with his 11-year-old son influences his work, the violence in his work, and much more: WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much? CM: For modern readers, yeah. […]
As you know, we’re a big fan of DZANC Books here at FWR. They’re the definition of an independent press, and their excellent taste in literature is a big part of the reason that their authors are regular recipients of everything from NEA grants to Andrew’s Book Club picks. However, not everyone knows that DZANC is more than just a publisher. They also run several charitable programs that seek to promote and increase literacy, especially among young people. One way that they do this is with the DZANC Writer in Residence Program, which operates in several different school districts in […]
I love giving magazine subscriptions as presents: it’s like a new gift every month. If there’s a reader–or a write–on your holiday gift list, how about a subscription to your favorite literary magazine? Most subscriptions run under $40, a bargain for a present that provides a fresh infusion of stories, poems, and essays over the course of a year. And you’ll provide much-needed support to literary journals and the writers they publish. Old standbys like The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review put out beautiful, hefty issues 4 times a year. Want your stories more frequently? […]
“Always give your characters their best shot.” — Stuart M. Kaminsky
As writers, we can add on (and on) to the external details of a character, trying to make that person real in the way that Pinocchio hopes to become so. Theoretically, we might be able to acquire enough details in a personality inventory for our readers to accept our characters as convincing. But ultimately, as Stuart Kaminsky knew, this way of creating character doesn’t work because it’s the subtext of our characters’ lives that make them real. Using the “inventory” process to get to know them is fundamentally flawed because it makes us lazy.
The National Endowment for the Arts just announced this year’s recipients of their Literature Fellowships. Each individual is awarded $25,000 to “set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.” The Creative Writing Fellowships alternate years between prose (fiction and creative nonfiction) and poetry. The next cycle will be poetry, with an application deadline of March 4, 2010. You can find guidelines and more information here. This year’s winners were a diverse group, ranging from established authors like Z.Z. Packer to relative newcomers. Other standouts were essayist Donovan Hohn, whose forthcoming book, based on his Harper’s essay “Moby […]
Have you met The Nervous Breakdown yet? Founded by author Brad Listi, this new website is intended as a new space for authors to promote their work. The fiction section’s aim, as explained in an open letter, is not only akin to that of all good literary magazines–to showcase some of the most vibrant writers working today–but also to help provide these writers with a vehicle to market their books. This is why we provide links to authors’ websites and sales pages: to help directly connect the writers we love with their audience–TNB’s large, loyal and growing readership. But don’t […]
