Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘rewind’

Shop Talk |

The Second Pass, and life after print

by Anne Stameshkin

Tonight I stumbled (for the first time, I’m ashamed to admit) upon The Second Pass. This fantastic lit site, edited by freelance writer and former Harper Collins editor John Williams, features a blog and an impressive range of features: essays, interviews, and reviews covering both new releases (Circulating) and backlist titles (Backlist). Another section, The Shelf, features reviewlets of recent titles, with links to and excerpts from other reviews across the bookosphere. To celebrate the site’s first year anniversary, twelve contributors (including the editor) wrote pieces on their favorite out-of-print books. Williams introduces the combined result, “Tales of the Unread,” […]


Reviews |

A Little Bone of Crazy, or This is Your Brain On Snowbroth: Leni Zumas’s Farewell Navigator

by John Madera

Most of Leni Zumas’s stories in her exceptional (and stylistically exciting) debut, Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008), are compact studies of paralysis in the tradition of Beckett and Ioensco. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren for having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears “of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand.”


Reviews |

How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead, by Ariel Gore

I haven’t read a book on writing nearly as useful as Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead: Your Words In Print and Your Name in Lights since I bought a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. This is a must-have DIY how-to for any writer interested in success, whether that means starting with homemade zines, jumping straight into big-time publishing, or working part-time on that novel while slaving away at your day job. Gore’s advice will help writers get the word out, get noticed, and get famous—without being a colossal jerk, fame whore, or media spammer.



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