controversy in the rye, part IV
by Anne Stameshkin
Stephen Colbert is trying to lure J. D. Salinger out of seclusion (and onto his show) by threatening to publish Salinger ripoffs.
Anne Stameshkin lives in Brooklyn. Her fiction has been published in the Chattahoochee Review andNimrod, and her book reviews have appeared inEnfuse magazine. Anne holds an MFA (fiction) from the University of Michigan. She pays the bills as a freelance editor, writer, and writing teacher, most recently at Connecticut College. While in-house at McGraw-Hill, Anne edited a number of literature and composition texts and two craft books—Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola and The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation by Nicholas Delbanco, among other projects. She is currently at work on a novel. Some recently published collections she recommends include If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black, The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter, and Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle.
Stephen Colbert is trying to lure J. D. Salinger out of seclusion (and onto his show) by threatening to publish Salinger ripoffs.
In the New York Observer, Leon Neyfakh recently named this summer’s “status galleys,” the ones you get pick-up lines and publishing cred for reading on the subway. And over at Neyfakh’s former home, Gawker‘s Foster Kamer sprays the mystique off one of them, Joshua Ferris‘s The Unnamed (due to publish in January 2010), in this first installment of the Status Galley Book Club. He gives the novel a very positive review, but notes that the mainstream buzz anticipating its publication is too loud (and its galleys too widely distributed) for its status to be Truly Hip. Silly as it may […]
The Guardian, true to its list-loving proclivities, offers “Text on the Beach,” the 50 “best summer reads” of all time. Which ones did they miss? I’d add The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Michael Chabon) and Sag Harbor (Colson Whitehead). Or Goodbye, Columbus (Philip Roth), paired with essays by Mary McCarthy. For a real scorcher? Dante’s Inferno.
This week’s New Yorker features an excerpt (titled “Childcare”) from Lorrie Moore’s long-awaited new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, coming this September from Knopf. I agree with The Millions, however, that novel excerpts can be hazardous to your reading health–and having read the ARC, I must say this particular morsel doesn’t stand alone as a story or represent the fabulous feast it comes from. So if you can restrain yourself, wait until this book is out and read the whole thing. And in case you missed it, the November 4, 2008 issue featured an excerpt (titled “Lostronaut”) from what […]
The judge has ruled: Salinger wins, and 60 Years Later will not publish.
The Millions does an amazing job of covering (in what could oxymoronically be called a comprehensive summary) this fall’s most talked-about forthcoming books, including novels from E.L. Doctorow, Margaret Atwood, William Trevor, Kazuo Ishiguro, Lorrie Moore, Thomas Pyncheon, Jonathan Lethem, A.S. Byatt, Richard Russo, Dave Eggers, John Irving, Audrey Niffenegger, and Philip Roth. And yes, I’m now drooling.
On June 25, Wag’s Revue–a free, online-only literary quarterly–followed their exciting (and much-discussed) first issue with their second, which looks very promising. So why is this lit mag different from all other lit mags? In the words of Sandra Allen, the journal’s nonfiction editor, Wag’s Revue “aspires to marry the freedoms of the Internet with the strictures of a traditional printed quarterly, creating something entirely new (a ‘wag,’ if you will). It’s an exciting solution, I think, to print’s demise, and a good read for anyone interested in the future of the American literary quarterly.” From the press release: Faithful […]
Blog readers, check out our latest features on the main site: [review] Sophie Powell recommends the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (edited by Tara L. Masih), “an unprecedented gathering of 25 brief essays by experts in the field that includes a lively, comprehensive history of the hybrid genre.” [essay] – Laura Valeri engages with and rebuts the notion that fiction writers are “failed poets.” [interview] – Mary Westbrook talks with award-winning author Janet Peery about the particular process of expanding stories into novels, what being a “writer’s writer” really means, how she’d respond if a student […]
On June 10, for one day only, Haaretz replaced its reporters with 31 of Israel’s literary writers, instructing them to cover the news. The result? Top stories about “integration at the giraffe enclosure, love in the cancer ward, mosaics in Tel Aviv, addicts at the Jerusalem rehab centre, and a visit to the grave of a holy man, among others” (via Metafilter). The Jewish Daily Forward‘s David Estrin describes the experiment: Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The […]
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