#empathyforeverybody: An Interview with Maya Sloan
by Steven Wingate
Ever wonder what it’s like to keep your writerly identity while collaborating on novels with incredibly famous people? Maya Sloan can tell you.
Ever wonder what it’s like to keep your writerly identity while collaborating on novels with incredibly famous people? Maya Sloan can tell you.
It is probably ridiculous to even put “J.K. Rowling” and the word “emerging” in the same thought. (Excerpts from the Wikipedia article about her: “best-selling book series in history,” “net worth US$1 billion,” “forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007,” and “Most Influential Woman in Britain”—and that’s only in the introduction.) But I’m tempted to look at Rowling’s first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, in the same light as a more traditional debut novel. I know, it’s NOT not her first novel. But even “debut” authors usually have a few books under their belts, even if those novels have never […]
Not awesome enough? How about Rosa Parks reading a children’s book about herself, Gabriel Garcia Márquez wearing a book like a hat, or William S. Burroughs reading to Kurt Cobain? Much more at the Awesome People Reading Tumblr site. (You’re welcome.)
For some reason, I don’t think of celebrity authors as emerging writers. After all, they’ve got well-established careers of their own acting, directing, or being beautiful/audacious/infamous. It’s hard to think of someone like James Franco—who seems to be everywhere this year—as an “emerging” anything. But Franco recently published his first collection of short stories, Palo Alto, which officially makes him an emerging writer. He seems to be taking it seriously: according to Wikipedia, Franco “simultaneously attend[ed] graduate school at Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, […]
Seven Stories Press has just released Nader’s novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, in which Yoko Ono, Warren Buffet, Ted Turner, Bill-Cosby, Paul Newman, and other influential figures meet, Justice-League style, to defeat bad guys Lancelot Lobo, Brover Dortquist, and corporate CEOs. In an author’s note, Nader himself writes: This book is not a novel. Nor is it nonfiction. In the literary world, it might be described as “a practical utopia.” I call it a fictional vision that could become a new reality. Some known and not-well-known people appear in fictional roles. I invite your imaginative engagement. If that […]
