You Don't Say (Free subscription) | yesterday
In Good as Gold , Joseph Heller summarizes the basic rules of behavior: Don’t make personal remarks, never tell a hostess you enjoyed yourself, don’t force anything mechanical, never kick an inanimate object, and don’t fart around with the inevitable. Heller’s rules of behavior owe something to a set of principles articulated by Nelson Algren: Never eat at a place called Mom’s....
英文人行道 et cetera, et cetera (Free subscription) | yesterday
'Cheever: A Life' By BLAKE BAILEY This detailed biography follows John Cheever’s path step by stumbling step, disclosing the addictive urges and bawling self-pity to which he subjected himself and those in his household. (Knopf, $35.) Review | Excerpt bawling noun has one meaning: Meaning #1 : loud cries made while weeping Synonym: wailing The adjective bawling has one meaning: Meaning #1 : crying...
Poor Mojo Newswire (Free subscription) | 22/11/2009
Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories - Review - NYTimes.com Here is a sample, but please read the whole thing. The bits about how his editor mangled (or improved) his work are shocking. Fun fact: Did you know that once during an alcohol-fueled rage Carver opened his wife's jugular with a broken wine bottle? And until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’...
Bibliobibuli (Free subscription) | 19/11/2009
The National Book Award winners were announced November 18 during a ceremony in New York City. These are probably the major US awards after the Pulitzer Prize, and there are several categories. The prize for fiction went to Irish author Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin , which is based on life in New York City in the 1970s. The piece was described as an "indelibly hallucinatory portrait...
Jacket Copy (Free subscription) | 19/11/2009
The National Book Award for Fiction went to Colum McCann for his novel "Let the Great World Spin," a story of New York in 1974 that doubles as an allegory of 9/11. It was the final award at the black-tie...
Isak (Free subscription) | 19/11/2009
No surprise here: The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor won the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction tonight, in a public vote that received more than 10,000 responses in the final stretch. Find my NBA review of the book here, and the nascence of the mild (and, it seems, totally unnecessary) campaign for its win here. O'Connor's book was chosen by readers over the other finalists: Invisible...
Isak (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
The new issue of The Collagist is up and out, and with it comes a vibrant collection of poems, stories, novel excerpts, nonfiction, and book reviews. A new section of the magazine appears this month: Classic Reprint, which features fiction by John Cheever with an introductory column by his son, Benjamin H. Cheever. For my video book review this month, I took on Lori Ostlund's collection of stories,...
Matt Bell (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
The fourth issue of The Collagist is now live! In Issue Four, we've got fiction from Cooper Renner , Chad Benson , Kate Petersen , and Lance Olsen (with art by Andi Olsen) , as well as novel excerpts from Xiaoda Xiao and Ornela Vorpsi . You'll also find poetry from Arlene Ang , Stephen Dobyns , Judy Huddleston , and Keith Taylor , plus non-fiction from Brian Oliu and Melissa Pritchard . In book reviews,...
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...
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