Words: just another corporate gimmick
by Celeste Ng
We don’t need writers. Here’s the proof, via web comic xkcd:
We don’t need writers. Here’s the proof, via web comic xkcd:
I’m thankful for many things this Thansksgiving–friends, family, bits of good fortune large and small that have come my way over the past year. But in terms of stories, there’s one I’m eternally grateful for: Julie Orringer‘s “Pilgrims.” I first encountered “Pilgrims” in The Best New American Voices 2001, where it was the lead-off story. It begins simply enough: a family–father, mother, sister, brother–are headed to Thanksgiving dinner. But within paragraphs, you feel less and less at ease. The mother is gravely ill, as are many of the parents at the group dinner. Brother and sister must contend with a […]
A recent discussion on the community blog Metafilter asked, “Please tell me one book you think everyone should read and why. Fiction or nonfiction, doesn’t matter. I’m not so interested in hearing about your favorite book or your desert island book, but a book you think everyone would benefit from reading.” In a matter of hours, over a hundred people responded with their recommendations. Many suggested nonfiction—from Richard Dawkins to Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond to The Art of War to the Bible—but surprise! Many others felt that the one book everyone should read would be fiction. Here’s […]
This week’s feature is Rahul Mehta’s debut collection, Quarantine, published this year by Harper Perennial. Mehta was born and raised in West Virginia. He received his MFA from Syracuse University, where he was the Cornelia Carhart Ward Fellow. Stories from this collection have appeared in such places as The Kenyon Review, The Sun, Epoch, Noon, and Fourteen Hills, as well as having been selected for New Stories from the South. Mehta lives with his partner in Alfred, New York, and teaches at Alfred University. In her recent review of this collection, contributor V. Jo Hsu writes: In his debut publication, […]
Last week we featured White Truffles in Winter as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Eric Wyatt (@ericswyatt) Colette Sartor (@colettesartor) Victoria Barrett (@enginebooks) To claim your free subscription, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!
Yesterday we talked about a tool to help you analyze your writing for “flabbiness” or “fitness” based on your use of prepositions, adjective and adverbs, and so on. But could analyzing your writing tell you something about your mental fitness, too? Researchers now believe that they may be able to detect the early signs of Alzheimer’s from a writer’s language. In a recently published paper, scientists at the University of Toronto examined the output of three writers for signs of the disease. From the study (titled “Longitudinal detection of dementia through lexical and syntactic changes in writing: a case study […]
Is your writing lean and trim? Or does it need to shed some flab? Recently, user Leigh posted on FWR’s Facebook wall about an interesting writing-analysis tool, WritersDiet. Intrigued, I clicked on over. WritersDiet is a free online tool that analyzes a sample of your text. Paste in any text you want, hit “Run the test,” and the site provides an overall “fitness” report and a bar graph showing your usage of verbs, nouns, prepositions, adjectives/adverbs, and it/this/that/there. Here’s how it scored a few different samples: 1. The opening paragraphs of a front-page story from the New York Times: The […]
In possibly the cutest book promotion campaign ever, Melville House has started an adopt-a-penguin program to—oh, I’ll just let them explain: To celebrate our publication of Andrey Kurkov‘s beloved Russian crime-fiction series starring a penguin named Misha, Melville House is announcing a new Adopt-a-Penguin program. No, really… We will adopt a penguin in the name of any bookstore who successfully sells 25 copies of either book (combined or single title) in the series, which includes Death and the Penguin or Penguin Lost. The contest will run from now until December 31st. As a reader all you need to do is […]
So November is halfway over–you’re half done writing your novel for NaNaoWriMo, right? Right? Whether you’re doing NaNoWriMo or not, there are always those days–or weeks, or months, or, let’s face it, years–when you just feel like you Cannot. Write. Anything. I don’t claim these are foolproof solutions, but here are my own personal tips to get started working again. 1. A journey of a thousand pages begins with opening your document. Maybe it’s just me–but 90% of the time, just opening up the right file seems like a big step. I find a million other places to click: Facebook, […]
HUGE congratulations to friend of FWR Jesmyn Ward, who just won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction for her novel Salvage the Bones! In reviewing Ward’s novel, Ron Charles wrote in the Washington Post, When the finalists for the National Book Award in Fiction were announced last month, I’m embarrassed to admit that I was among those critics grumbling about the obscurity of some of the authors (Andrew Krivak?), even some of the publishers (Lookout Books?). […] I’m happy to eat my words. And my spinach. I’ve just read another one of the so-called obscure finalists, “Salvage the Bones […]
First, there was Ernest Hemingway, Yelper: Infusion Tea and Coffee House Category: Coffee & Tea THREE STARS I got up late and the sun was already high and I had been drunk the night before. The barista brought me a cup of coffee and asked if I wanted anything else and when I said no she left. The coffee was good and very hot. I sat at the table for a while. When I was done the barista came and cleared my mug and went back behind the counter. I ordered a muffin to go and walked out into the […]
Novels are like sensible, high-achieving older children. Short stories are the quirky, free-spirited, lovable babies of the family. And the oft-overlooked middle kid? In the writing world, that would be the novella. The novella has been getting a little more attention lately. The Booker Prize went to Julian Barnes’s 150-page A Sense of an Ending, prompting The Guardian to wonder if “is it not time for the novella once again to be out and proud?” But then again, it seems it’s always been almost the novella’s time to shine. Last summer, Taylor Antrim predicted on The Daily Beast that the […]
