Young Artist, Mean World
The art world is a rough place, which is the practical thought behind art schools offering courses on grant-writing and portfolio building. Still, even with the presence of these utilitarian…
Posts by tag
short stories
374 posts
Ladies and Gentlemen
The brief unresolved narratives of Adam Ross’s new short story collection, Ladies and Gentlemen, show regular people with compelling problems.
The Mythologist Of Our Time
Ray Bradbury conjures up for me images of sun-drenched Nebraska meadows, autumn landscapes beset upon by Buick-sized ravens and dusty towns overrun by sinister carnivals. He reminds me of the…
“The future of literature is safe”
“I do believe that literature and storytelling has a safe future. The medium is still being negotiated, but I believe that we evolutionarily developed to speak and use language, and…
The Sunday Rumpus Book Blog Roundup
My relationship with the book blogs has hit a snag. Today, we got in a throw-down fight, and I came pretty close to breaking some china. It’s just that the…
Are Printed Literary Journals Imperiled?
“For me, if there’s a piece of writing that I care about, I want to have the physical object,” says Brigid Hughes, editor of the literary journal A Public Space.…
American Short Story Writers Are Taught To Do It Wrong
John Barry has a piece up at The Baltimore City Paper in which he argues that too many American short story writers are taught to try to mimic that famous…
How Not to Be Boring
Tim O’Brien has a really brilliant article in The Atlantic in which he argues that the biggest problem with “unsuccessful stories” is, to put it quite simply, that “they are…
Attention Spans are Not the Problem
A few weeks ago, I argued that the Internet age was uniquely well suited to selling short story collections. A few commenters did not agree with what seemed to be…
Smart People Talk Short Stories
In a post last week titled More Crappy News for Short Story Writers, I lamented what I considered to be a lost opportunity for the big publishing houses. They could,…
More Crappy News for Short Story Writers
Mark Trainer publishes an excerpt of a note he received from a “thoughtful, well-respected agent” on his blog. “I have no confidence in being able to place a collection at…
THE LONELY VOICE #4: John Edgar Wideman Confronts
Some stories cut so close you can only tell them in shards.