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.
Most of the stories from Kelly Link’s second collection, Magic for Beginners are now available in a free download. Link’s first foray into YA lit, Pretty Monsters (illustrated by Shaun Tan), published earlier this week; I’m excited to get my hands on a copy.
We knew Palin could recite fiction. Now Slate’s Hart Seely adds line breaks to give us the poetry of Sarah Palin; among her works are “Befoulers of the Verbiage,” “Small Mayors,” and a haiku. Also on Slate, Kitty Burns Florey attempts to diagram the candidate’s sentences. “…The more the diagram is forced to wander around the page, loop back on itself, and generally stretch its capabilities, the more it reveals that the mind that created the sentence is either a richly educated one—with a Proustian grasp of language that pushes the limits of expression—or such an impoverished one that it […]
In her debut novel, Preeta Samarasan tells the story of both one ethnic Indian family and the whole country of Malaysia, reminding us that History is the individual people it happens to.
One of my favorite blogs is Erika Dreifus’ Practicing Writing, an offshoot of her larger site The Practicing Writer, originally referred to me by Celeste. One day I’ll have to devote a long entry to the awesomeness of the many rich resources and services Erika provides to writers–most free of charge–but for now I’ll just link you to her astute review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works, a book that I’ve been both savoring and smacking against things this fall. How Fiction Works will be FWR’s next Discussion Review. If you’d like to join the conversation — I’m getting in […]
Head to the Asian American Writers Workshop (AAWW) next Tuesday, October 7 at 7pm for: The Practicing Writer Panel: How To Get An Agent Literary agents Jin Auh (The Wylie Agency), Ayesha Pande (Collins Literary Agency) and Amy Tipton (FinePrint Literary Management) will discuss how to get your manuscript into the right hands and find a good home for your book(s). The AAWW is located at 16 West 32nd Street (between Broadway & 5th Avenue), 10th Floor, NY, NY.
What novel(s) would you love to see adapted – or adapted more successfully – for the screen? Name that book; I’ll devote future “weekly dream cast” competitions to any novel that gets more than one mention.
How Far is the Ocean from Here, Amy Shearn’s captivating debut, follows a young surrogate mother who flees to the desert shortly before her due date. Accomplishing a seemingly impossible goal, the novel sustains the quality and language of a short story for 320 pages. Shearn exceeds at painting characters and relationships – particularly the bond between surrogate Susannah and father Julian; an adopted child himself, Julian feels a strong pull to the woman carrying his first blood relative–much to the chagrin of his wife, Kit. The book’s POV, a shifting third person with hints of omniscience, is ambitious and […]
This story (audio and transcript available here) covers the high rate of teen suicide on Nantucket. The community is struggling with how to cope – and how to prevent further cases; psychologists and trauma specialists are working with police officers and teachers, training them to identify (and recommend to counseling) kids who suffer from depression. At a town meeting earlier this year, Harvard’s Robert Macy urged parents to take the time to really listen to their kids, stressing that this was more important that actively trying to prevent them from harming themselves. All of this seems like good work and […]
Book-cut Sculpture (Su Blackwell) The Sorted Book project (Nina Katchadourian) Pulp fiction scenes (Thomas Allen) Book collages (Lisa Kokin) Book autopsies (Brian Dettmer)
On the topic of our “you’ve got to re-read this” series, I highly recommend this wonderful essay from Tim Kreider at Balitmore City Paper. When Books Could Change Your Life: Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do Let’s all admit it: We never got over those first loves. Listen to the difference in the voices of any groups of well-read, overeducated people discussing contemporary fiction, or the greatest books they’ve ever read, and the voices of those same people, only two drinks later, talking about the books they loved as kids… […]
