2014
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Dickens Gave Us Christmas, and Ghosts
Today there is plenty of fretting over the “War on Christmas,” but the holiday didn’t always hold such importance in everyday lives, even for Christians. Two hundred years ago, industrialization gave people a lot more to worry about than Black…
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How Should A Person Read?
While Tim Parks doesn’t want to be prescriptive, he offers his own techniques as inspiration: Getting a sense of the values around which the story is organizing itself isn’t always easy; I might change my mind two or three times.…
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Word of the Day: Silvicide
(n.); a special pesticide intended for killing unwanted trees and other brush It was the kind of horrific end no one could have imagined for the demure Harkey matriarch … her death represented the final, sordid unraveling of one of…
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Paper Trumpets #15: Puffy Has Something
The images and text on this collage are from an old Christmas book called Baby’s First Christmas, a short picture book published in 1983. I took the story text (about 100 words) and re-arranged it into a sort of dada…
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Small Presses, Big Problems
Have you ever considered what it would be like to run a small press? J. David Osborne, who runs Broken River Books, explains just what happens in a typical day: I check my email. There’s someone who’s interested in submitting…
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Tip of the Hat to Colbert
Among the many tributes to the nine-year run of The Colbert Report, which aired its final episode last week, comes Vulture’s tip of the hat on behalf of “book nerds.” The Colbert Report interviewed two authors a week, on average,…
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Protecting Our Writing
Though copyrights on creative works are automatic, those protections get complicated quickly, especially when it comes to publication. Howard Richard Debs breaks down the basics of copyrights for writers, explaining over at The Review Review some of the elemental concepts…
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Buy Bishop’s North Haven
If you happen to know a poet with $130,000 burning a hole through his or her pocket, alert them at once: Elizabeth Bishop’s home in Nova Scotia is up for sale. Although Bishop lived there for only a few years,…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
We’ll be taking the rest of the week off. See you soon and try to be good to each other out there.
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Anthony Trollope’s Controversial American Christmas
Trollope cheerfully turned up and enjoyed and a convivial dinner in the company of men who, that very morning, had been deciding whether to go to war with his country.
