Step One: Leave home. Three fellows from the Sozopol Fiction Seminar consider questions of travel, culture, and translation. Part I: John Struloeff on international diplomacy and collaboration, Jane E. Martin on finding home abroad, and Michael Hinken on how we rediscover home by leaving it. Later this week: Molly Antopol and Lee Romer Kaplan.
This week’s feature is Jonathan Lethem’s most recent novel, Chronic City, published by Doubleday in 2009. Lethem is the author of seven other novels, three collections of stories, and two books of essays. He’s also contributed to dozens of edited anthologies, journals and magazines, and garnered numerous awards during his career, most notably a National Book Critic’s Circle award for Motherless Brooklyn in 1999 and a MacArthur Genius Award in 2005. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine with his third wife, filmmaker Amy Barrett, and their son. In 2009 he co-founded Red Gap Used Books in Blue Hill, Maine, with […]
Last week we featured Men in the Making as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Ted Thompson (@Tednotedward) Daniel Perry (@danielperrysays) Louis Dzierzak (@WriterLou) To claim your free copy, 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!
Approximately one hour ago, the finalists for this year’s National Book Awards were announced on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s morning radio program, Think Out Loud. The event took place in front of a live audience at the new Literary Arts Center in Portland, Oregon, at approximately 9am Pacific Time. And we’re pleased to announce that some of our favorite fiction titles last year have been selected. Congratulations to: Fiction: Andrew Krivak for The Sojourn Tea Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife Julie Otsuka for The Buddha in the Attic Edith Pearlman for Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Jesmyn Ward for Salvage […]
This week’s feature is Tyler McMahon’s How the Mistakes Were Made, published this week by St. Martin’s Griffin. Born and raised in the Washington, DC area, Tyler McMahon studied at the University of Virginia and Boise State University. Before writing his first novel, he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, a surf instructor in California, and waiter in Montana. He co-edited the anthologies Surfing’s Greatest Misadventures and Fishing’s Greatest Misadventures for Casagrande Press. He lives in Honolulu with his wife, food writer Dabney Gough, and teaches in the English Department at Hawaii Pacific University. His short stories […]
Sponsored by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, the 2012 Desert Nights, Rising Stars conference will be held February 23-26 in Tempe. The conference brings writers of all levels together for four days in Tempe to study fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. This year’s conference faculty includes Sally Ball, Robert Boswell, Bernard Cooper, Denise Duhamel, Carolyn Forche, Pam Houston, Adam Johnson, Mat Johnson, A. Van Jordan, Antonya Nelson, Alix Ohlin, Jem Poster, Melissa Pritchard, Jeannine Savard, Eleanor Wilner and Xu Xi. Additional guests include: Norman Dubie, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Cynthia Hogue, T.R. Hummer, Tara […]
I began submitting to Glimmer Train in 1997, the same year I received my undergrad degree in creative writing from the University of Michigan. That fall, following graduation, my now-wife and I moved to a small cabin on a lake in northern Michigan so that I could be “a writer.” I’d thought I needed to live deliberately, like Thoreau, to nurture my creative spirit. But as we’ve often joked since, the experience was more like The Shining–though with a lot less space. One positive during that experience, however, was that a story of mine received an honorable mention from Glimmer […]
As you may have noticed, our blog posts and features this week have all centered on the art of writing and the particular art of teaching writing. Some argue that writing can’t be taught, of course. Others say that only the craft of writing is teachable–that the spark of imagination and the vision of creation is not. But regardless of where you find yourself on the spectrum, we believe writers need community, and also that a community dialogue–whether in a workshop, a reading group, or an online forum such as ours–naturally benefits how we read and experience writing, as well […]
This week’s featured title is Knuckleheads, by Jeff Kass. Published in April by Dzanc Books, this is Kass’s first collection. He is also the author of a chapbook of poetry, Invisible Staircase, a chapbook of essays, From the Front of the Room, and a one-man poetica performance, Wrestle the Great Fear. Kass teaches creative writing at both Pioneer High School and Eastern Michigan University. He also serves as the Literary Arts Director at Ann Arbor’s teen center, The Neutral Zone. In March of this year, Carlina Daun and Allison Kennedy sat down with their former writing teacher to talk about […]
Last week we featured The Oregon Experiment as our Book-of-the-Week title, and we’re pleased to announce the winners. Congratulations to: Ed Quest (@edquest) Shuchi Saraswat (@ssaraswat) Matt Ellsworth (@1MJE) To claim your signed copy of this collection, 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!
