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Join NOW!“If your task is to push out the boundaries, and open up the universe, you cannot do that by sitting safely in the middle of the room. If you want to push out the borders, you have to actually go to the borders and push against them. You have to go to the edge and […]
...more“New online lockboxes allow you to specify beforehand who’ll get your passwords, which private Flickr photos should be purged, and what final status should be posted at Facebook, but these services are no substitute for a will. And writers and other artists should be especially careful about relying on them.” Maud Newton ponders the potentially […]
...moreI’ve recently been in awe of the short stories of Paul Bowles, the American ex-pat novelist, composer, and translator who lived in Morocco and wrote The Sheltering Sky and who was basically Beat before the Beats. Besides maybe Flannery O’Connor and Poe, I can’t think of any other short stories that have so riveted me. […]
...more“Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or “fat Fate”, as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature’s dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.” — Martin […]
...moreWriting by hand does remind you, primally, of what this crazy thing we do is made of. The careful spilling of ink on paper, the joints and girders of letters. Paragraphs as immovable as cornerstones and the proud stab of a punctuation mark. The occupational hazards of a rip in the paper’s membrane or a […]
...moreBritish 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 […]
...moreThis 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.
...moreTom Shone has been studying writers who have quit drinking. He’s doing it, of course, for a novel he’s writing. How meta. Still, he gives us some interesting anecdotes.
...moreI laughed out loud, like a lot of writers probably did this week, when I read J. Robert Lennon’s confession in the L.A. Times, The Truth About Writers. The truth, it turns out is that “writers don’t spend much time writing.”
...moreRumpus Books asked dozens of writers what they’ll be reading on New Year’s Day, 2009. Here’s what they said:
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