Joshua Bodwell is the editorial director at David R. Godine, Publisher and Black Sparrow Press in Boston. He served as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance for nearly a decade. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in magazines and quarterlies such as Ambit (London), Glimmer Train’s Writers Ask, Poets & Writers Magazine, Threepenny Review, and Slice. His journalism has garnered awards from the Maine and New England press associations. He was awarded the 2015 Marianne Russo Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. (Photo Credit: Curt Richter)
“Slow and rich and so atmospheric that you can taste the ocean’s salt spray on your lips, ‘The Boat’ is run through with that rarest of qualities in fiction: the story feels mythic”: Joshua Bodwell on Alistair MacLeod’s short fiction.
Richard Ford returns to Montana and heads north to Canada. His seventh novel explores life’s borders.
On June 9, 1992 I turned seventeen years old and my father gave me a single gift: a book that contained a short story that changed my life. The book was Septuagenarian Stew by Charles Bukowski and the short story was the first in the collection: “Son of Satan.” It’s a simple story, really, just six and a half pages long, propelled by curse-riddled dialogue and clipped, action-filled sentences. Classic Bukowski. But unlike many of Buk’s bum and whore populated tales, “Son of Satan” is told by an eleven-year-old narrator. After the narrator and his two friends accuse another boy […]
When media outlets that cover the American publishing industry report on book sales and e-books “vs.” print books, they often cite percentages of sales increases and sales decreases as evidence of the current state of affairs. In reality, percentages don’t and can’t offer a full picture. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) recently released book sales data for November 2011. The e-newsletter Shelf Awareness had this to say about the AAP report: E-books yet again had the biggest gain, but the 65.9% increase marked a slowing of what had been triple-digit increases for most of the preceding several years. In […]
What is the difference between art and life, between the writer and the writing? In this essay on the late, great Andre Dubus, we learn how Dubus recognized “transformative moments” as authors Richard Ford and Anne Beattie, among others, weigh in on his talents, and his legacy.
Award-winning short story author and bon vivant Simon Van Booy releases his first novel, Everything Beautiful Began After, and proves that his crystalline, poetic prose, showcased in essays and short stories up to now, is also compelling in long-form fiction.
Borders filed for bankruptcy on February 16, and the bookselling behemoth will be pulled from the New York Stock Exchange today, March 21. This collapse of the second-largest bookseller in the U.S. hangs like a pall over the entire book industry. Just as the growing interest in digital reading devices has led some pundits to cry that the “death of books” is nigh, some would have us believe that the Borders book bungling is representative of the entire book industry. So how healthy is the bookselling industry really? On the day Borders filed for bankruptcy protection, Publishers Weekly put numbers […]
Lily King’s three novels stand as testaments to the power and endless variation of familial relationships. King’s latest novel, Father of the Rain, tells the story of a daughter’s life-long, primal loyalty to her charming and manipulative father. Interviewer Joshua Bodwell discusses longhand, autobiographical influence, puppies, and how to depict realistic sex, with a writer whose work remains “a beacon of tenderness and sincerity.”
United States Artists, the five-year-old philanthropic organization known for the fifty $50,000 fellowships it awards each year to “America’s finest artists,” has gotten into the Kickstarter business. Propelled by their mission to “invest in America’s finest artists and illuminate the value of artists to society,” United States Artists has started a Projects portion of their website, designed to help several of their fellows launch projects. The new initiative caught my eye when Wesley McNair, a Maine-based poet whose work I greatly admire, announced “Letters Between Poets.” McNair himself was a USA Ford Fellow in 2006, and is much-revered for penning […]
Through prose that is concise, confident, and empathetic, Malie Meloy evokes what David Foster Wallace called the “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions” of life, and treats them with “reverence and conviction.” Joshua Bodwell talked with Meloy about her newest collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, the craft of writing short fiction, and the art of finding the right voice for a story.
