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.
Big congratulations to Uwem, for securing the #1 spot on Entertainment Weekly‘s best book (fiction) of the year list!! Here’s their list of 2008’s “10 must-reads”–and here is Jennifer Reese’s review of the book from June.
I’m excited to hear Jesmyn Ward read from her beautiful debut novel Where the Line Bleeds. Her reading tonight is part of “Rear Windows,” a BAM Cafe event presented in partnership with A Public Space. This last installment of the Between the Lines series also features a reading by Ian Chillag, films by Félix Dufour-Laperrière and Eva Weber, and a multimedia performance by Dark Hand and Lamplight. Go here for directions and more information.
Over the next week, I will join fellow FWR contributors Greg Schutz, Celeste Ng, Natalie Bakopoulos, and Jeremiah Chamberlin in discussing critic James Wood’s latest collection of essays, How Fiction Works. Feel free to join the conversation by commenting on our blog posts. In How Fiction Works, Wood approaches the elusive how behind craft by “ask[ing] a critic’s questions and offer[ing] a writer’s answers.” He explores such mysteries as the distinction between narrative and authorial language in order, in his own words, “to reconnect that technique to the world, as Ruskin wanted to connect Tintoretto’s work to how we look […]
In his wonderful Nobel lecture, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio argues passionately why the writer, literature, and literacy matter in a global society, responding in particular to Stig Dagerman’s Essäer och texter. I greatly admire how this speech–like the best fiction–is at once intimate and inclusive, intensely personal yet widely relevant. Some choice excerpts: If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection. The writer, the poet, […]
Non-profit publisher Dzanc awards this annual $5,000 prize based on (1) the quality of a writer’s work and (2) a proposal to undertake a specific community service project. This year’s winner, Kodi Scheer, will lead three 10-week writing workshops for patients, caregivers, and staff at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at U-Mich’s hospital. A recent graduate of the Michigan MFA program, Scheer was the recipient of the 2008 Creative Writing Prize for outstanding MFA thesis, and her stories have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and Quarterly West. She is writing a story collection with the working title Gross Anatomy. To read […]
Kudos to Timothy Egan, who articulates perfectly why publishers–especially in this climate!–should shun Joe the Plumber in favor of real writers.
Preeta Samarasan‘s Evening is the Whole Day is getting some well-deserved list love. For the Guardian‘s best books of 2008, Ann Tyler names the novel as one of her top three (along with two other books reviewed on FWR, Miriam Towes’s The Flying Troutmans and Richard Price’s Lush Life), and Ali Smith also chooses it (along with Toni Morrision’s A Mercy and the reprint of Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity) for the Times Literary Supplement‘s Books of the Year List. Congratulations, Preeta! And thanks to fabulous lit-blogger Bibliobibuli for the news and links.
Check out the 21st annual Indie and Small Press Book Fair this Saturday and Sunday (December 6 and 7) at the New York Center for Independent Publishing and the General Society, 20 W. 44th St. Here is a list of book fair exhibitors and a complete schedule of sessions, readings, read-a-thons, and other events, including a panel discussion on the future of independent publishing, a live interview with Kelly Link, and a debate between David Rees and Matt Taibbi. Donations are encouraged. Stop by and show your support for independent publishing! Also check out New York magazine’s “The Curated Bookshelf,” […]
Warm congratulations to Hannah Tinti! Check out the story here. Bonus: Hannah is guest-teaching my fiction workshop tomorrow. As a longtime fan of her work (and a One Story subscriber) I am thrilled to formally meet her and introduce her to my students. And a review of the dazzling The Good Thief is forthcoming (this weekend or next week) on FWR.
Vote at the Book Design Review for 2008’s best cover. I hope this one wins:
