Celeste Ng is the author of the novels Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (2017). She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Flavorwire has compiled a list of 20 incredibly gorgeous bookstores—like the Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid, housed in a converted theater in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Click over to see the whole post—guaranteed to make you want to visit each and every one. Happy Friday! Further Reading: More amazing bookshelves to inspire (or inspire envy) Coolest bookshelves
Do you have a cell phone? Of course you do. Everyone does. So what will become of all those public pay phone booths that no one needs anymore? Columbia architecture grad John Locke has an idea: turn them into public bookshelves. Reports The Atlantic Cities: [I]n the past few months, the Columbia architecture grad has slipped around Manhattan with a sack of books and custom-made shelves, converting old pay phones into pop-up libraries. The concept, sponsored by Locke’s imaginary Department of Urban Betterment, is that New Yorkers will pick up unfamiliar titles while running their errands and then, perhaps, replace […]
There are lots of reasons to read fiction. But did you know it can also make you a better businessperson? In the Harvard Business Review, Anne Kreamer makes “the business case for reading novels.” She argues: Over the past decade, academic researchers such as Oatley and Raymond Mar from York University have gathered data indicating that fiction-reading activates neuronal pathways in the brain that measurably help the reader better understand real human emotion — improving his or her overall social skillfulness. […] In one of Oatley and Mar’s studies in 2006, 94 subjects were asked to guess the emotional state […]
Like most readers, you probably have your own mental image of Humbert Humbert, or Emma Bovary, or the Misfit. But if you’re the kind of person who likes a visual, check out The Composites, a Tumblr site that plugs literary descriptions of characters into police composite sketch software. The results are… well, take a look below and decide for yourself. Here’s how the police sketch program portrayed the three characters I mentioned above, along with the passages that generated them. (All images via The Composites.) Humbert Humbert, from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: Gloomy good looks…Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous […]
Not at AWP—and wishing you were? Don’t. Here are 3 great literary things you can do this weekend because you’re not at AWP: 1. Go to a reading. Hear Alice McDermott at Hofstra, Karen Joy Fowler in San Francisco, Jodi Picoult in Boston, or any of a dozen other great readings. Poets & Writers has a handy calendar, searchable by state or city, or check your local bookstore’s website. 2. Take a writing class. Many writing centers offer one-night classes, so take advantage of them while others are away. Happening AWP weekend: in Boston, Grub Street offers classes such as […]
So you’re not at AWP right now, and you’re wondering what kind of highjinks you’re missing? I can promise you, you’re not missing anything as fun as the sessions on Full Stop’s mock AWP schedule, which I must confess looks way more exciting than the original. Here are the sessions I’d be attending at this alterna-AWP: 4 Over 400: The Gutenberg Problem. Noted grimoire authors Merlin, Gandalf, Conor MacLeod, and Albus Dumbledore discuss the potentially disastrous consequences of printing presses. Will the grimoire survive this radical new development in publishing? How should scroll hawkers best adapt to the new […]
Sorry. As a fellow dorky, Asian Harvard grad, I may have gotten swept up in the adoration of Jeremy Lin that’s sweeping the nation world. And, um, the puns—at least the ones that aren’t ethnic slurs. (Don’t get me started on that one, please.) Anyway. Thanks to his underdog-made-good story, Jeremy Lin has thoroughly saturated pop culture—everything from serious discussions of immigration to discount airfares. And now, Linsanity has entered the literary world. In the fortnight since Lin shot to fame, multiple authors have penned ebooks about him for the Kindle. Reports Fast Company: Several of the e-books repurpose publicly […]
It doesn’t happen often—a guest getting the last word on The Colbert Report? But it happened just earlier this week, when author Ann Patchett came on the show to explain why she helped open Parnassus Books in Nashville: because she was horrified that her town had NO bookstores. I was lucky enough to hear Ann Patchett in person, at the Muse and the Marketplace conference in Boston a few years ago, and I was impressed by how sharp she was—for example, she delivered a witty and inspiring keynote address without a single page of notes. (I wish I were cool […]
Okay, let me walk you through this one. The Thing Quarterly is a “periodical in the form of an object.” Says its site: Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create a useful object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped at a wrapping party and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers with the help of the United States Postal Service. The most recent issue (Issue 16) is a work by Dave Eggers in the form of a shower curtain. The […]
We’ve talked before about the love-hate relationship many writers have with Facebook. On the one hand, it allows writers to connect with friends, fellow authors, and fans, making that whole writing thing feel a little less lonely. On the other hand—timewasting! timewasting! timewasting! Maybe you want to spend time on a social network and feel productive. In that case, Mashable has compiled a list of 10 social networks geared specifically towards writers. From Inked-In to Writertopia to We Like to Write, each offers different support to writers: critiquing, paid work, or just a community of other writers. Do you know […]
