Community Building Through Workshops
Julia Fierro successfully launched her debut novel, Cutting Teeth, earlier this summer. A decade ago, she wasn’t so lucky with her first manuscript. Fierro arrived in New York City after…
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Ian MacAllen
1314 posts
Ian MacAllen is the author of Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American (Rowman & Littlefield, April 2022). His writing has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Southern Review of Books, The Offing, 45th Parallel Magazine, Little Fiction, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and elsewhere. He tweets @IanMacAllen and is online at IanMacAllen.com.
Riskier Books Find Readers
The changing economics of the publishing industry may be hurting profits, but it has also allowed writers room to experiment with new forms that are often more challenging to readers…
Tehran Taxi Library
A taxi driving husband-and-wife team converted their cab into a library with more than 40 titles, reports The Wall Street Journal. Mehdi Yazdany and Sarvenaz Heraner sell about 30 books…
Book Hunting
Future generations may never understand the simply joy of searching a used bookstore for a long-coveted title. While online megastores allow readers access to virtually any book, typing a title…
Author Selling Postcards Written in Blood
Writing a novel requires plenty of time, and Irish author Julian Gough is hoping to fund that time with a Kickstarter campaign he has dubbed Litcoin. For small amounts of…
Novels Are a Long Time Coming
Contrary to the mission of National Novel Writing Month, most novels take far longer to complete, as stay-at-home dad Ryan McSwain learned when he set out to write his first…
The Floating Library of Minnesota
With 10,000 lakes, it was bound to happen: The Floating Library, an eight foot square stocked with 80 books. Most of the volumes are handmade art books, the Star Tribune…
Literary Pioneers
Neither publishing books nor running a farm are particular easy career choices, but the folks over at Pioneers Press do both. The Pitch has an extensive write up on the…
The Post-Wounded Woman
Leslie Jamison‘s The Empathy Exams coins the phrase “Post-Wounded Woman,” referring to women who “are wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being…
Notable NYC: 8/16–8/22
Saturday 8/16: Natalia Sylvester reads her debut novel Chasing the Sun (June 2014) about a kidnapping in politically tumultuous 1990s Peru. BookCourt, 7 p.m., free. John Thomas Menesini, Karen Lillis,…
Submission Strategy
Writers don’t always use their time efficiently when it comes to submitting to literary journals. Luanne Castle, writing at The Review Review, explores strategies for improving the submission process: I…
Bringing Tolstoy to the West
More people were reading Tolstoy than any other author in translation at the beginning of the 20th century, but as late as the 1880s, few non-Russians had even heard of…