“Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller, and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.” — Leonardo da Vinci
This Sunday, I’ll sadly be driving away from Brooklyn, but if you’re lucky enough to live in or near King’s County, check out this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. Where: Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza When: Sunday, Sept. 13 from 10 AM – 6 PM What: A book fair surrounded by a variety of wonderful events — readings, panels, interviews, tributes, literary quiz games, film screenings, a comics jam, and workshops in book-making and cartooning. All events are free, but some require that you reserve space by picking up tickets one hour before the event at one of the info booths […]
New on the lit blog scene is the very fun Lit Drift, a self-described “resource and community dedicated to the art & craft of storytelling in the 21st century.” Our name is a nod to how traditional forms of storytelling are, well, drifting into forms wholly new and unexpected. We’re interested in sifting through the palimpsests known as the Internet, the arts, and the in-between to uncover those new forms and techniques in constructing fiction. We believe that literature should be fun in an age when it’s only too easy to turn on the TV and watch shitcoms instead. We […]
I saw Wendy and Lucy this past April, and there wasn’t any sound for the first ten minutes. Well, not no sound; there were the suggestions of breathing, some ambient rustling. The whispers filling the theater were mainly curious—could this be some new super-indie technique, perfected by director Kelly Reichardt for her second film? It turned out to be a technical mistake, and I found out what I missed when I read Jon Raymond’s “Train Choir,” the closing piece in his first collection, Livability, and the story on which Reichardt’s film is based.
At Bread Loaf, the first thing people asked–after “What’s your name?”–was often “What genre do you write?” There wasn’t any great divide between poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers, but somehow it seemed important to know. Maybe this is because we tend to think of our genres as very different forms with very different concerns and goals. I can’t count how many times I heard fiction writers say, “But I don’t know anything about poetry…” and poets say, “Well, I don’t get plot.” But actually, I think that poets and fiction writers have more overlap than they often believe. A […]
Rabih Alameddine’s latest novel, The Hakawati, is itself about the power of a good story—its ability to engage us and, when collected with other stories, make us who we are. The narrative takes readers from a hospital in present-day Beirut to a Lebanese village in the years before World War I, to the mythic medieval past of the Middle East. Some stories simply begin of their own accord, and others grow from tales already being told. For instance, the story of the hero Baybars, which stretches across the novel, is told within another story by an emir who hopes, through the telling, to ensure his child will be a boy–further testament to the power of (and power of believing in) stories.
On Thursday I emerged from a fog of editing work and serious reading in need of a pick-me-up, so I headed to Borders, hoping to get my hands on that much-hyped smeary deliciousness known as “Me and Mrs. Palin.” Alas — it’s in the October, not September, issue of Vanity Fair, and since I’m no longer a New Yorker, I’ll have to wait until Sept. 8 to buy a copy. To assuage my (embarrassing) disappointment, I reminded myself that I was in a bookstore, a struggling one at that. Never mind the towering to-read pile of books on my nightstand: […]
I was lucky enough to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont this summer, as a tuition scholar, and I’m still processing all that I learned. In the 12 days I spent on the mountain, I heard 101 people read in 24 separate readings. I attended 5 workshop sessions, 5 lectures, 3 craft classes, and countless cocktail hours. And I’m still kicking myself for not doing more. But I guess that’s part of the experience. Bread Loaf is an exercise in excess: a positive glut of new ideas and voices and inspirations. I left completely overstimulated, with a stack […]
According to Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, cooking is one of the things that makes us human. I would argue another important thing on that list is storytelling. Perhaps this is why good stories so often involve food.
Today is the debut of Novel Dishes, a new occasional series on Fiction Writers Review.
Apparently getting kids excited about books isn’t worth funding. It’s better to focus on the “mechanics” of reading because, you know, that will definitely instill the next generation with a passion for it. **head explodes** Via NPR: The show’s [26-year] run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights. Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in […]
