Of course, everybody knows that the AWP annual conference (being held this year in Denver, CO, if you haven’t heard) is all about making connections with other people in the industry, and hearing great authors speak, and discovering wonderful new journals that you’d otherwise never come across. But occasionally, at the end of a long [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Brooks'
On Drinking Networking
February 24th, 2010 5 Comments
Tags: Andrew · author readings · Brooks · networking · publishing industry
The Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction
February 23rd, 2010 2 Comments
If it takes you a long time to read The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, edited by Tara L. Masih, it is only because immediately after completing each chapter you will want to stop and write.
Tags: Brooks · Very Short Fiction
George Saunders and Ha Jin
January 17th, 2010 No Comments
George Saunders and Ha Jin read earlier today at Boston Public Library, which was was pretty impressive. Don’t despair if you missed it—Saunders has three Boston readings scheduled for February (link), and I assume Ha Jin will read again at some point, since he teaches at BU. Though they differ stylistically, both readers share [...]
Tags: author readings · Brooks
Shoplifting from American Apparel: An Interview with Tao Lin
November 4th, 2009 7 Comments
Tao Lin, 26, is a writer based in New York who blogs here. He is the author of the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, the short story collection Bed, released simultaneously in 2007 by Melville House Publishing, and two poetry collections: you are a little bit happier than i am and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. His latest is [...]
Tags: Author Interviews · Brooks · Shoplifting from American Apparel · tao lin
Rejection Letters I Wish I’d Received Even Though a Few of Them Would Have Hurt My Feelings
September 27th, 2009 1 Comment
It is now Fall, which means most literary magazines are once again open to submissions. Aspiring writers everywhere will send out batches of their work and hope to hear back before Christmas. Many journals respond quickly–within a month, within a week!–and even add the occasional tidbit of a personal response to their rejection letter. However, [...]
Tags: Brooks · getting published · literary magazines
Scalping Nazis for Aesthetic Purposes
August 27th, 2009 3 Comments
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something [...]
Tags: big screen/small screen week · Brooks
Writing Machines
August 9th, 2009 3 Comments
In On Writing, Stephen King’s “memoir of the craft,” he recommends that aspiring authors write 1000 words per day, in addition to reading “a lot.” A recent New Yorker article says of Joyce Carol Oates, “it has been said that, at one point in her career, she wrote forty pages of fiction every day…”
Tags: Brooks · John Hawkes · Joyce Carol Oates · Trollope · writers' habits · writing process
Man Booker Prize Longlist Announced
July 28th, 2009 No Comments
From BBC News: “The winner of the £50,000 award, which honours the best fiction written in English by an author from the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth, will be named in October. A shortlist of six will be revealed on 8 September.”
The longlist for this year includes nine authors from the UK, two from [...]
Tags: Brooks · literary prizes
Blood Meridian or the Best Western
July 17th, 2009 No Comments
I’ve mostly avoided books marketed as Westerns. I read the first Lonesome Dove book in high school, but all I really remember was a river-crossing scene with a giant ball of snakes in the water. Ghost Town, Robert Coover’s postmodern take on the Western, more or less unpacks all of the conventions of the [...]
Tags: Blood Meridian · Brooks · reading habits · Westerns
Rare Books, Indecipherable Texts, Precious Metals
July 11th, 2009 No Comments
This week, apparently, is travel writing week, but you don’t have to leave town. Thanks to literature, you don’t even have to leave your house to travel, inwardly at least. However, I’d like to recommend a book that’s well worth a trip to the library.
It’s called the Codex Seraphinianus, and is very mysterious. I learned [...]
