georgiasam (Free subscription) | 04/11/2009
John Cheever to Allan Garganus: ‘All I expect is that you learn to cook, service me sexually from three to seven times a day, never interrupt me, contradict me or reflect in any way on the beauty of my prose, my intellect or my person. You must also play soccer, hockey and football.’
Guide to Literary Agents (Free subscription) | 04/11/2009
Agent Interview by contributor Ricki Schultz . "Agent Advice" is a series of quick interviews with literary and script agents who talk with Guide to Literary Agents about their thoughts on writing, publishing, and just about anything else. This installment features Dan Conaway of Writers House . Dan has been Executive Editor at Putnam, Executive Editor at HarperCollins, Director of Literary...
Bertram's Blog (Free subscription) | 03/11/2009
One of the guest stops on my Daughter Am I blog tour is the Second Wind Publishing Blog. I talk about a fan letter (well, fan email) I received, and cite a quote by John Cheever, “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss — you can’t do it alone.” Many writers don’t consider readers [...]
Seth's blog (Free subscription) | 31/10/2009
In Exploratory Data Analysis, John Tukey tells about visiting a high-school chemistry class. Each student in the class had done an experiment to determine a physical constant. Tukey suggested to the teacher that they gather and plot the results. The teacher didn’t like this idea. Some of the students will have gotten the wrong answer, [...]
Isak (Free subscription) | 29/10/2009
Well, 2009 isn't exactly over yet, but Publisher's Weekly is getting a jump on the end-of-year lists of favorite titles. It's top hundred book list is forthcoming, but the top ten (including both fiction and nonfiction titles) are newly announced today. They include: The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (Pantheon); Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon (Ballantine); Big Machine by Victor LaValle (Spiegel &...
Salon.com (Free subscription) | 23/10/2009
We like to think of "good parenting" as a set of rules built in common sense and human decency, the kind of thing that should be universal, rather than subject to fashion or trends. Yet scratch the surface and all of us know that is manifestly false. The single biggest thing upper-middle-class suburban parents of "Mad Men" and John Cheever stories (with their highballs, drunk driving...
baithak (Free subscription) | 19/10/2009
The British base called Stalingrad * Self delusion Hindus and Muslims join hands to renovate a temple in Kashmir * Aur idhar hum aik doosray ko bomb se ooRa rahay haiN President Zardari extends local govts’ tenure till Dec 31 * Ad-hocism zindabad View from US: Inglorious acts Anjum Niaz * Expose- Tillman and McChrystal Alright instead of Jawabdeh - Jawab daiN -- to these queries ~~t Where are...
whoar.co.nz (Free subscription) | 18/10/2009
“..John Cheever, brilliant chronicler of American suburbia.. .. led a tortured double life filled with sexual guilt, alcoholism and self-loathing. On the eve of a major new biography, Rachel Cooke travels to his beloved home in upstate New York .. .. and meets his daughter, son and 90-year-old widow..” go to source/story> > The demons that drove John Cheever | [...]
Isak (Free subscription) | 17/10/2009
Brock Clarke has such a good essay about John Cheever in The Rumpus, in which he passionately writes of his disgust that the publication of Blake Bailey's biography of the writer--and the ensuing so-called "reassessments" of Cheever's legacy--have overshadowed the fiction itself. And this isn't a mere annoyance; Clarke is clear in his belief that the loss and lack is ours, rather than Cheever's....
Austinist (Free subscription) | 15/10/2009
Knopf, Book Jacket In Cheever, A Life , Blake Bailey combines a biography with some literary criticism. Weighing in at 679 pages, it is an even-handed and meticulously researched picture of this fiction writer best known for short stories. Bailey's authority comes from his knowledge of John Cheever’s writing and access to his unpublished journals. Although it pains me to say this, in general...
MSNBC.com: Lifestyle (Free subscription) | 14/10/2009
Tycoons, evolution and the environment were among the subjects of this year's National Book Award nominees. Winners in the four competitive categories, each of whom will receive $10,000, will be announced at a Nov. 18 ceremony in New York. Humorist Andy Borowitz will host and honorary medals will be presented to Gore Vidal and Dave Eggers.
Sidney Williams Journal (Free subscription) | 13/10/2009
Interesting creative writing class last night. I called the segment my "Pulling It All Together" session. I originally conceived the class as a beginning writing course for retirees ready to pick up their pens, possibly for the first time. My student makeup quickly expanded beyond that when it moved outside the junior college continuing education setting, so I have a mixture of people with...
Ryan McCarl (Free subscription) | 13/10/2009
It was after four then, and I lay in the dark, listening to the rain and to the morning trains coming through. They come from Buffalo and Chicago and the Far West, through Albany and down along the river in the early morning, and at one time or another I've traveled on most of them, and I lay in the dark thinking about the polar air in the Pullman cars and the smell of nightclothes and the taste of...
A Pelt, a shrub, a soil sample (Free subscription) | 07/10/2009
Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna Ted Jenner Titus , 2009 (This review first appeared in Breif 38) This collection should be compulsory for anyone interested in innovative writing from New Zealand, and Scott Hamilton’s introduction offers a fantastic entry-point into what is a startling and difficult oeuvre. The opening piece, “A Quiet Shape”, is dense and somewhat daunting;...
<HTMLGIANT> (Free subscription) | 01/10/2009
Who wrote The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction? The Stories of John Cheever Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison The Collected Stories of William Faulkner The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty YOU DECIDE
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