…tore in Denver. Visit the Authors on Tour – Live! site, subscribe to the podcast for free via iTunes, follow Authors on Tour on Twitter, or visit the website and enter your email address to be notified of upcoming podcasts….
…rvice of illustrating some abstract concept or theme. The writing, then, becomes an exercise to teach a lesson rather than an honest exploration of what it means to be human. As Tim O’Brien explains in his essay “The Magic Show”: Above all, writing fiction involves a desire to enter the mystery of things: that human craving to know what cannot be known. … When writing or reading a work of fiction, we are seeking access to a kind of enigmatic “othe…
…l, including The Road by Cormac McCarthy, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. map for The Kite Runner – Google Lit Trips A complete list of the books on Google Lit Trips can be found here. To access the maps, you need Google Earth (a free download). And if you’re so inclined, the project is open to user-created maps for other works of literature. Imagine the possibilities: a globe-hopping “lit…
…rther Resources Read excerpts from A Better Angel: “A Better Angel” in the New Yorker and “The Sum of Our Parts” in the New York Times. Here is Bookslut’s 2008 interview with Adrian. McSweeney’s site offers an introduction to Adrian’s second novel, The Children’s Hospital (McSweeney’s, 2006), and the publisher’s own interview with the author. You can download an excerpt from the novel here. Read about Adrian’s debut novel, Gob’s Grief (Random Hous…
…Book of the Year from her home city paper, the Los Angeles Times. In this latest book, Silver navigates the inner turmoil of men and women who are often adrift in their own psyches, but does so with a sure, precise hand. One nearly forgets how difficult it is to make a piece of writing appear effortless, just right. Marisa Silver, by Bader Howar Alone With You is populated with characters free of gimmickry, the fantastic or grotesque. These peopl…
…ronological release, push notifications and badges will alert readers when new stories have downloaded. One-button sharing will make posting these reading lists to friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter simple and intuitive. “Book are present goods as you experience them, but they become a social good as you want to share the experience. Stories aren’t shared, but comments on them are,” said Vidich. “Stories are not technical. The tech is f…
…e short stories, essays, and novel excerpts, all available to stream or to download to the device of your choice. Most content is free access; individual pieces are available for purchase after they’ve been on the site for three months. Recently, The Drum also formed a partnership with audio publisher Iambik: Being in the business of audio literature, The Drum has partnered up with Iambik Audiobooks to bring you selected first chapters from their…
…including Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, Kiran Desai, and Kevin Brockmeier. New Yorkers can catch upcoming shows live at the Peter Sharp Jay Theatre (buy tickets here). Luckily for the rest of us, shows are also available on public radio, online, and by podcast (go here to subscribe). And here is a schedule of upcoming readings; this page also features a link to find Selected Shorts on your local public radio station. (On WNYC, it airs Saturdays an…
…aying here, and it’s very clear that the narrator is a fully developed and complex individual, not, as you say, simply a psychological type. At the same time, I was struck by the moment in the third section of the book where, as the narrator waits for the results of an STD test, it occurs to him that “I wanted the world to have a meaning, and…the meaning I wanted it to have was chastisement.” Six months after the Supreme Court struck down the rema…
…onents of modern American life and rearrange them such that the familiar becomes startling, problematic, and new. I first met Chris Leslie-Hynan at a cocktail bash for attendees of the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. I was drunk and Chris was crashing the party; we struck up a conversation in which I made the kind of wild generalization that seems important under certain alcoholic conditions and he responded with what I can only call a graceful diffi…
