Slow Writing: Archaic Forms of Technology Outlive Newer Ones
We love the image of these young people laboriously but lovingly writing their personal diaries as a way to preserve culture:
...morePosts by: Mark Pritchard
Help Send Ted Rall to Afghanistan
You’re probably familiar with the work of cartoonist Ted Rall, whose work appears on Salon and in many other places. He is raising money for a trip to Afghanistan to report, in his way, on the situation there, and through a website, you can support the trip with small donations. I really like the micro-granting […]
...moreWoman Whose Bio Resembled Novel’s Character Awarded $100K
A woman who claimed a novelist and former friend based the character of a sexually promiscuous alcoholic on her has won a $100,000 libel award from a Georgia jury. Vicki Stewart claimed that Haywood Smith, a former childhood friend, used her as the basis for a character in her novel The Red Hat Club. During […]
...moreLiterary Discussion Masquerading as Hulking
From a recent blog entry by author Cathleen Schine:
...more“My Worst Mistake? Getting Sick of My Work”
Fiction writer Michelle Wittle got so tired of going over her short story that she just sent the damn thing out, assuming it had no typos. Oops. Of course, this is why you have friends read your stuff just to look for typos that make you look like a lamebrain. But even several pairs of […]
...moreVan Booy Wins Frank O’Connor Award for Short Story Collection
British writer Simon Van Booy has won “the world’s richest short story prize”, the Frank O’Connor award, for his collection Love Begins in Winter. Van Booy, who lives in New York and is also the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love, receives €35,000. This is the fifth time the Frank O’Connor prize […]
...moreWorld’s most sinister dingbats
While browsing the web during a slow pre-holiday weekend day at work, I stumbled across a font family called Vialog, which is intended to be used primarily in signage. One of the fonts in the family, Vialog Signs Conduct, contains some of the most sinister glyphs I’ve ever seen. You could practically storyboard a thriller, […]
...moreKerouac: American-French-Latino?
This account of a New York colloquium designed to highlight Jack Kerouac’s Québéqois roots has an odd turn at the end, in which the reporter calls attention to the fact that the confab was part of a series on Latino writers. “The boundaries are blurring,” said the series’ curator.
...moreThe Limits of Narrative
In a post on The Guardian (UK), books writer Alison Flood writes about the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books and how she would skip ahead to find out whether a prospective choice “led to the treasure in the cave or a horrible death, escape from the dungeon or a watery doom.” She calls […]
...moreWhy We Need Vampires
In the New York Times today, filmmaker and author Guillermo del Toro and coauthor Chuck Hogan –they have a novel coming out called The Strain — write about how vampires first made it into popular culture early in the 19th century when a group of English writers summered at a villa on Lake Geneva. Mary […]
...moreApple’s rumored Tablet: what’s it for?
Rumors of a new device supposedly being prepared by Apple for a release sometime in the next five months are flying this morning after an FT.com story which describes about a flat, rectangular device with which users would interact by way of a touch screen. The gizmo is said by various writers to be a […]
...moreVollmann’s ‘Imperial’ country
William T. Vollmann, the author whose exhaustive research helps to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, and whose books tend to be measured by the pound, has a new book coming out titled Imperial. The 1300-page tome looks at the arid California-Mexico border, and its culture and people, from many angles. The New York […]
...moreHow the NYTimes Book Review selects books to review
In a post on the blog Book Publishing News, publicist Scott Lorenz distills a recent speech by New York Times Book Review Editor Barry Gewen and accounts from other sources to form a picture of how the NYTBR — probably the most influential and widely-read book review in the country — actually chooses which books […]
...more“Why don’t you dance with her?”
In the Guardian, novelist Ewan Morrison — whose newest novel is called Ménage — tosses out a list of literary ménages à trois, leading off with the Hemingway erotic novel (some would call it an embarrassment that Hemingway never intended to publish) The Garden of Eden. One of the most notable scenes left off Morrison’s […]
...moreBeacon Press to Republish Out-of-print MLK Books
Beacon Press has come to an agreement with the heirs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to republish four out-of-print books by the clergyman and civil rights leader, including “Strength to Love,” a collection of his most eloquent and inspiring essays tying the message of Jesus to the struggle for civil rights, as in the […]
...moreNovelist disappears into illness, addiction
Kaye Gibbons, author of the 1987 debut best-seller Ellen Foster and several subsequent novels, is the subject of an Associated Press profile published in several newspapers and Sunday book sections over the weekend. The article traces her downfall from “vivacious” best-selling author to her 2008 arrest for forging hydrocodone prescriptions to her disappearance into mental […]
...moreWhy we need newspapers: They stand against tyranny
In the 1960s and 70s, Central and South America were rife with dictatorships which used secret police, the military, right-wing death squads and tight control of the media to quash dissent and keep power. One of the most egregious of these police states was Argentina, still recovering from its anti-democratic Peronist era. In that nation, […]
...moreNewspapers dying? Maybe it’s just the cities they mythologized
An interview on New American Media with writer Richard Rodriguez has a fascinating take on what’s happening to American newspapers. Using the famously provincial San Francisco Chronicle as an example, Rodriguez says, “I don’t think the Chronicle is dying so much as I think that San Francisco is dying.”
...moreTrevor Paglen reveals the “Blank Spots on the Map”
Trevor Paglen may be familiar for his 2008 appearance on The Colbert Report, where he talked about his book I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to be Destroyed By Me, a picture book of military unit patches worn by servicemen in secret flight squadrons and other classified projects.
...morePaterson’s Great Falls, inspiration for writers, named national park
President Barack Obama signed legislation on Monday naming the Great Falls on the Passaic River in Paterson, N.J. a national historic park. The 77-foot falls, site of early American industrial plants, has also inspired American writers. The great 20th century poets William Carlos Williams, whose epic work “Paterson” used the falls and the river as […]
...moreKerouac’s lost French works
The Words without Borders blog has a fascinating post on two novellas by Jack Kerouac in his native French, works that were written in the early 1950s and which reflect his interest in Proust, Balzac and the French literary tradition. News of Kerouac’s French works came in a panel at the Americas Society in New […]
...moreKerouac Joins Crew of Novelists
Publishers Marketplace reports that Harpers has agreed to publish “The Sea is My Brother,” a “lost” novel by Jack Kerouac, written in 1942 and based on his experiences in the Merchant Marine. According to the book “Desolate Angel” by Dennis McNally, Kerouac wrote the work while on the SS Dorchester, where he served in the […]
...moreThe Unhappy Writer, Links by Mark Pritchard
A recent entry on the publishing blog Galleycat told of the writer Molly Jong-Fast and how she was quitting writing to become an agent. Jong-Fast’s somewhat privileged complaints — she is the daughter of Erica Jong and the novelist Jonathan Fast, and signed her three-book contract at age 20 — put me in mind of […]
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