Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Lee Thomas’

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No flack from Chuck

by Lee Thomas

Anyone with a television set (by no means a given anymore) and network reception (ditto), has probably not escaped the fact that this is Oprah’s last season. Her most recent Book Club selection – announced during her show featuring Jonathan Franzen, post-controversy – were not one, but two novels by Charles Dickens. The Oprah Book Club paperback version combining A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, clocks in at a whopping 848 pages (oh, the serial novelist!). Oprah has picked classics in the past, East of Eden, As I Lay Dying, and Anna Karenina have made the list. At […]


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Sad Scribblers?

by Lee Thomas

GalleyCat reported a few weeks back that a piece in Health magazine listed writers on a list of 10 careers with high rates of depression. The original Health list says, of artists, entertainers and writers: These jobs can bring irregular paychecks, uncertain hours, and isolation. Creative people may also have higher rates of mood disorders; about 9% reported an episode of major depression in the previous year. This is by no means new territory, there’s long been a body of study around the artistic teperment and depression, including Kay Redfield Jamison’s article “Manic Depressive Illness and Creativity” from Scientific American […]


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Safely Scared

by Lee Thomas

Over lunch with a friend a few weeks back, we discussed the qualities of enduring children’s literature. Almost simultaneously, we both lit upon the fairly common idea that children really, truly love to be frightened – not so different from their more mature counterparts. “Safely scared,” was how he put it, and I couldn’t agree more. December always puts me in mind of reading as a child, the early-dark nights, the cold driving us inside, reading Roald Dahl or Madeleine L’Engle or the Grimm brothers by flashlight. Traditional fairy tales are often far darker than our novelists dare – the […]


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Thursday morning candy: failbetter.com

by Lee Thomas

failbetter.com has their Winter 2011 issue up and available. You can read fiction from Caren Beilin, Jimmy Chen, and Alexandra Chasin. Also featured: a story called “The Snowstorm as Romantic Accumulation,” written by Ryan Call and Christy Call, a brother and sister. The piece is an excerpt from their ongoing field guide to North American weather. I’m always intrigued by collaborations – especially in something as personal and finicky as fiction. The Calls’ approach to the story has several elements that draw me in: elemental musing, family, a dash of mystery. Their story begins: A snowstorm consists of an almost […]


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Amazon offers Bookscan data

by Lee Thomas

I first heard about this via Stephen Elliott’s very fine Daily Rumpus newsletter, then tracked down some more info via TechCrunch. Amazon has begun to offer Bookscan sales tracking data to authors for free. Stephen Elliott writes: If you’re an author you can now see how many books you’ve sold through Amazon.com. They’ll connect you to the Book Scan database, you’ll see how new copies of your book moved in retail stores across the country. This used to take longer. You would ask your agent, who would ask your publisher. You had to trust people. Once in a while you […]


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Glimmer Train Open

by Lee Thomas

Glimmer Train hosts several “Fiction Opens” each year, which provide an opportunity to submit to a terrific journal with a chance at some serious prizes: Open to ALL writers. First place has gone to beginners with no previous publications and to accomplished, established writers. All are welcome. Word count range: 2,000 – 20,000. (Yes, a 2,000 word piece can compete against a 20,000 word piece—it’s the story that counts.) First place wins $2,000 and publication in Issue 82 of Glimmer Train Stories. Second- and third-place winners receive $1,000/$600 (or if chosen for publication, $700). The December contest closes on January […]


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From Hemingway's portrait to lit-tats

by Lee Thomas

I recently stumbled upon Poets & Writers’ “Clips” section, “a curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.” It’s an interesting, eclectic cross-section of video that touches on the literary, but isn’t always quite so literal. There’s a clip of photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt’s recalling what it was like to shoot Ernest Hemingway’s portrait for the cover of Life magazine in 1952, a Notre Dame student performing his musical homage to Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, a timelapse video of artist Mike Stilkey assembling an installation with books as his sculptural medium. Or […]


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Thursday morning candy: Waccamaw

by Lee Thomas

It’s been out for a while, but I’ve been perusing Waccamaw: A Journal of Contemporary Literature, Vol. 6. The biannual, online journal out of Coastal Carolina University includes fiction by Julie Babcock, Sarah McCraw Crow, Billy O’Callaghan, Nick Ripatrazone, and Jennifer Spiegel, along with poetry, essay, and a long interview with poet Natasha Trethewey. There’s also a transcript of Trethewey’s Emory University Distinguished Faculty Lecture, which she delivered earlier this year. In it, she observes: It seems to me that all writers, at some point, must respond to a question—posed either by themselves or someone else—in order to answer, as […]


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The Fiction Project

by Lee Thomas

Like to doodle in the margins of your stories? Sketch in the park until inspiration for a story strikes? The folks behind Art House Co-Op – out of the Brooklyn Art Library – who came up with the traveling Sketchbook Project, that sends themed sketchbooks around the country on exhibit, have just announced The Fiction Project. Like The Sketchbook Project, anyone can participate, for the $25 entry fee they’ll send you a book to fill: The Fiction Project is an opportunity to tell stories in a different way by fusing text and visual art. Add your voice to this year’s […]


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Figment.com – self-publishing 2.0?

by Lee Thomas

With gangbusters press coverage on Monday, Figment.com launched a fiction-sharing site. Co-founded by Dana Goodyear, staff writer at The New Yorker, and Jacob Lewis, a former Managing Editor at The New Yorker, the site sets up its mission like this: Figment is an online community to create, discover, and share new reading and writing. Follow your literary obsessions. Find fans for your work. Read the latest by your favorite authors. Vote up the best stories. Embrace your inner book nerd. Read. Write. Procrastinate. Repeat. Whatever you’re into, from sonnets to mysteries, from sci-fi stories to cell phone novels, you can […]




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