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.
Last Tuesday night I joined over 300 neighbors and book lovers in the lobby of BAM-Harvey to rally support for an independent bookstore in Fort Greene. The event was sponsored by FGIBI, or the Fort Greene Independent Bookstore Initiative (FGIBI), and its guest of honor was Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, winner of the 2007 Brooklyn Public Library PowerUp! prize for her business plan to open an independent bookstore in Brooklyn (and publicity/events coordinator at McNally Jackson). FGIBI formed after a survey by the Fort Greene Retailers Association showed that 75% of respondents prioritize having a bookstore (as opposed to other types […]
The Book Design Review is one of my favorite book blogs. Earlier this month, Joseph Sullivan published what he hopes will be “the first of many” interviews on the site. Read about the inspiration and process behind Art Director Lisa Fyfe’s design of Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (August 2008, Henry Holt).
Jack Handey tells NY Times readers how to find the humor section in a bookstore. One deep thought: Some scientists bemoan the fact that it’s so hard to find humor in bookstores. But I prefer to look at it philosophically. I think it was Robert E. Lee who said, “It is well that the Humor section is so terribly hard to find, lest we laugh too much.”
Once there was a city where everyone had the gift of song. Once there was a city where people did not look one another in the eye. Once there was a man who happened to buy God’s overcoat. The View from the Seventh Layer is a rich, ethereal collection: here are fables, ghost stories, romances (among them a sci-fi adaptation of “The Lady with the Pet Dog”), personal histories, anxieties of influence, and spiritual bursts — even a choose-your-own-adventure for the soul. These stories unfold in worlds just shy of our own, where metaphors take literal form. Each explores the […]
According to this recent study, fiction makes you more empathetic–and therefore less socially awkward. If you’re British, you can even use those bookish charms to find love on PenguinDating, “where book lovers meet.” From the Penguin Blog: Sure, some of us might be trapped in joyless, loveless relationships with people who get upset because we were looking at online dating websites, even though it’s for PERFECTLY REASONABLE reasons like fabricating a picture of a King Penguin with a match.com profile KATE. But there are others out there yet to find that special joyless, loveless relationship in which to get trapped. […]
In his essay “No” (Kenyon Review, Spring 2008), Brian Doyle both asks and answers that question of questions: Why do editors say no, anyway?
Pick up the current issue of Tin House and read “Fresco, Byzantine,” a story by FWR contributor Natalie Bakopoulos. They had come of age in such places, those island prisons—during the Nazi occupations, during the civil war, throughout the fifties, and now—and now some were growing old there. This issue, “Political Future,” also features fiction, nonfiction, or political-literary commentary from the likes of José Saramago, Thomas Franks, Francine Prose, Wallace Shawn, Cynthia Ozick, Dorothy Allison, Charles Baxter, John Barth, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Lydia Millet, and others.
At the FGIBI party, I had the chance to meet Jami Attenberg, whose novel-in-stories Instant Love I recently read and admired. Instant Love follows an ensemble of vivid characters whose lives intersect as they stumble upon, after, or away from romance. Whether the passion in question is fleeting or fundamental, each story sharpens to a fine narrative point–a moment of connection or dissolution. The effect of reading these stories together satisfies more than merely sampling one. Attenberg makes me believe in her characters’ lives beyond the page by offering scenes across shared history (spanning high-school romances to hasty marriages and […]
The stories David Foster Wallace contributed to Harper’s are now available online. “The Depressed Person” (first published in 1998) is a powerful piece, now harrowing to reconsider. I’ll admit I couldn’t get through DFW’s Infinite Jest, but I’ve long admired his shorter prose for its mad genius energy and intelligence. Another must-read, especially for tennis lovers, is “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again; an earlier version is available on the Harper’s site).
