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Join NOW!A writer of recognized fame in a niche, cliquey genre probably feels like Ashton Kutcher did the morning after Hollywood’s premiere of Dude Where’s My Car: happy, thankful, and proud of the job he did, yet claustrophobic in the pigeonhole of his success. This is when the writer creates a pen name to wipe clean […]
...moreThe digital literary press Ox and Pigeon was created in 2010 by three friends who, on vacation in Peru, recognized the need for high-quality English translations of all the brilliant yet inaccessible foreign authors we don’t realize we’re missing. Their current project, The Portable Museum, is a collection of stories originally written in Spanish by […]
...moreThe new issue of SF Weekly features the life stories, translated from their own words, of four gay and transgender Latin American immigrants who came to San Francisco in the 1980s. The pasts they left behind are as dissimilar as the routes that led them to San Francisco, each a complicated journey shaped by the […]
...moreThe Los Angeles poet, translator, and filmmaker David Shook has created a Kickstarter campaign with the imaginative objective of purchasing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—i.e., a drone—to rain specially comissioned poems on cities around the world. The poems, printed on biodegradable paper implanted with wildflower seeds, will address the US military’s covert drone strikes, which […]
...moreAt the New York Review of Books‘s blog, Tim Parks explores how authors might subconsciously get inspiration for their novels from unresolved personal conflicts. Specifically, he reflects on the lives of Chekhov and Faulkner, making connections between their real-life hardships and the perils confronted by the protagonists in their work. This is congruent to Joan Didion’s thoughts […]
...moreIf a book is any good, there is usually a supporting character living inside of it that you’d like to learn more about. Maybe it’s the dialogue they provide, their juicy backstory, or their consequential antics, but you can tell they’d lead an interesting fictional life—one worth writing about. In an open-ended list, Edan Lepucki looks […]
...moreA goddess going by the name Nicole Sullivan has put into action an idea we’ve all had at some point: how nice it would be if that coffee shop inside the bookstore was a tavern. Sullivan heard our prayers, and on Memorial Day BookBar opened its pearly gates.The specialized establishment provides locals with an ideal place […]
...moreWhether or not the fate of your future depends on how well you study for the literature GRE, Jimmy Chen’s mock exam will not help you. In any case, the fake test offers short-lived amusement, with obscure references and subtle jokes that will leave you feeling special and a little less lonely for understanding.
...moreOn Monday, the novelist Matthew Sharpe announced that once a week for the next twelve weeks he will write a very short story to post on his blogspot as an experiment in self-publishing. Uncommonly simple in execution, his blog is pure unadulterated text. Anything more would take away from his brilliantly observed vignettes that seem […]
...moreBeneath Hemingway’s estate in Havana, Cuba, 2,000 documents were left forgotten and unpublished in his damp basement. The estate, neglected because of its tricky location, was becoming increasingly decrepit until 2004, when Jenny Phillips, the granddaughter of Hemingway’s editor, founded the Finca Vigia Foundation. The found items are mostly personal letters, written for his wife, […]
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