Suspend Your Disbelief

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TED talks: writers on writing

by Anne Stameshkin

Celeste just turned me on to TED — or Technology, Entertainment, Design; on their website, this organization offers videos of more than 200 lectures by VIPs from a wide swath of industries and arts. Here’s a sampling of talks by writers: – Dave Eggers describes his experience working with 826 Valencia, encouraging creative people everywhere to get involved with public schools. – Amy Tan explores “where creativity is hiding.” – Isabel Allende discusses passion, creativity, and definitions of feminism. – Elizabeth Gilbert gives a lecture on “genius” and creativity.


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In the Convent of Little Flowers, by Indu Sundaresan

by Lee Thomas

Indu Sundaresan’s fourth book and first story collection, In the Convent of Little Flowers, contains India’s multitudes, all in relationships of opposition – men vs. women, traditional vs. new, haves vs. have-nots. Throughout these nine stories, Sundaresan cultivates empathy for her characters and their individual anguish at straddling those great divides.


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more (and more and more) e-reader and Kindle links

by Anne Stameshkin

In the latest The Quarterly Conversation, William Patrick Wend’s “Intro to E-Lit: How Electronic Literature Makes Printed Literature Richer” discusses N. Katherine Hayles’ book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary and defends e-publishing. Slate‘s Farhad Manjoo loves the Kindle but fears it’s bad news for the current publishing industry. Booksquare argues that the text-to-speech verdict, supposedly a win by Authors Guild (who aggressively pursued this issue), might (ironically) benefit Amazon the most in the end. Check out her earlier post on e-book pricing. The latest Kindle news is at Kindlebuzz, and folks are talking about nothing else at KindleBoards.


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writing: how much do writers like doing it?

by Anne Stameshkin

Weighing in on this question for the Guardian are authors A.L. Kennedy, Amit Chaudhuri, Hari Kunzru, John Banville, Will Self, Joyce Carol Oates, Geoff Dyer, Ronan Bennett, and Julie Myerson. I identify most with Hari Kunzru‘s take; yes to the freak-out and self-disgust but also the “spinning words like plates…”: I get great pleasure from writing, but not always, or even usually. Writing a novel is largely an exercise in psychological discipline – trying to balance your project on your chin while negotiating a minefield of depression and freak-out. Beginning is daunting; being in the middle makes you feel like […]


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reading on probation

by Anne Stameshkin

For the NY Times, Leah Price takes a look at Changing Lives Through Literature, “an alternative sentencing program that allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club. […] [C]riminals who have been granted probation in exchange for attending, and doing the homework for, six twice-monthly seminars on literature.”


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DFW's unfinished novel

by Anne Stameshkin

This week’s New Yorker has an excellent piece on David Foster Wallace, on his struggles with depression and with writing The Pale King, the unfinished novel he left behind. Wallace’s wife found several thousand pages of the work in progress in their garage after his death. The book (a partial manuscript) will be published posthumously by Little, Brown next year; D.T. Max (writer of the New Yorker piece) describes it as about “a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work.” Here are some manuscript pages from […]


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Andrew's Book Club: March picks

by Anne Stameshkin

For March, Andrew recommends three collections: 1. from a university press (University Press of Kentucky): Jim Tomlinson’s Nothing Like an Ocean: Eleven stories about life in the rural Kentucky town of Spivey; Tomlinson’s first collection, Things Kept, Things Left Behind, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. 2. from an independent press (Autumn House): Samuel Ligon’s Drift and Swerve: From the author of the novel Safe in Heaven Dead, this story collection won the 2008 Autumn House Fiction Prize. 3. from a big house (Pantheon): Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry. Gaitskill’s first collection in more than a decade is highly anticipated. Here’s […]


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Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist / call for reviews

by Anne Stameshkin

This £10,000 prize will be awarded in May by Arts Council England (with Champagne Tattinger). Here, as listed on The Bookseller, are the longlisted books, whose English translations each published in the UK in 2008. The shortlist will be announced on April 1, 2009. My Father’s Wives by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese (Arcadia) The Director by Alexander Ahndoril, translated by Sarah Death from the Swedish (Portobello) Voice Over by Celine Curiol, translated by Sam Richard from the French (Faber) The White King by Gyorgy Dragoman, translated by Paul Olchvary from the Hungarian (Doubleday) Night […]


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The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart

by Charlotte Boulay

E. Lockhart’s latest YA-novel–wherein Frankie Landau-Banks infiltrates her boarding school’s all-male secret society–is a lot of fun. The book is also a love letter to teenage girls asking them to value their own worth. As an antidote to the swooning of the Twilight crowd, Frankie’s gutsy determination is a welcome dose of a different kind of romance.


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recommended reading: Jofie Ferrari-Adler's Q&A with four young editors

by Anne Stameshkin

As previously mentioned, I adore Jofie’s P&W “Agents & Editors” features, and this latest installment should especially interest FWR readers: Jofie (himself an editor at Grove/Atlantic) talks to editors Richard Nash (who, sadly, just resigned from Soft Skull Press), Lee Boudreaux (Ecco), Alexis Gargagliano (Scribner), and Eric Chinski (FSG) about falling in love with books for a living, choosing authors and manuscripts, surviving the future of publishing, and more.




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