December 2010
44 posts
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2010 Outtakes and Orphans
Most of my short stories originate with phrases or scenes that spring to mind fully-formed. Many stop there: derivative, too fanciful, or concerned with characters I end up not being interested in spending time with or knowing what to do with; or insufficiently layered, or too slight a vein to be worth mining. Sometimes I’ll return the next day or an hour later to scraps I rushed to jot...
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“It’s as if tendencies that seem most rooted in our minds, most singular...”
– Alice Munro, “Friend of My Youth” [full story (subscriber-only)][abstract]
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James Wood's 2010 Reading List →
A short, great list, including two I particularly want to read, Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novella 03, and Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary.
Wood’s explanation for why we need Davis’s Flaubert is the kind of sentence-level attention I love in his commentary:
After the aristocratic libertine, Rodolphe, first sees Emma, he goes home certain that he is going to get...
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Q & A With David Means →
via frontofbook:
How long does it take you to write a short story? Means: I usually have a couple of stories on the go at one time, but it can take six months to a year to complete one story. With this latest collection it took me five years to get all the stories together. I think the short-story collection is a bit like the way the record used to be: a sense of coherence, a sense of direction or...
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Three New Poems by Dorothea Lasky →
from “The Room”:
I ask him if this is America It is, the golden man says As he catches us at the end of the hole Where there is a room With all my friends By friends, I don’t mean all of the people I’ve known I mean all of the people I’ve truly loved Smiling at me, everyone is calm I sit down and they all come rushing at me My father fastens me to a seat...
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The Math of Publishing
I missed this excellent Publishers Weekly piece last month, which details the $ behind the flight of midlist authors to small presses:
Although small presses give less money upfront, their model is more viable for a lot of fiction. The same book that disappoints by selling only 10,000 to 15,000 copies at one of the big six is a big hit at a small press.
[…]
Johnny Temple, at Akashic...
The Dangers of Homonyms
Pier Review vs. Peer Review
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Autobiographical Memory
A friend of my friend Mojie will be on 60 Minutes tomorrow:
“It was slightly rainy and cloudy on January 14, 15th. It was very hot the weekend of the 27th, 28th . No rain,” recalls Louise Owen, one of the six known people with superior autobiographical memory, when asked by a scientist which days it rained in January - in the year 1990!
“They can do with their memories what...
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kaash asked: Hi Sarah, I came across this: http://www.slate.com/id/2275733/pagenum/all/#p2 and thought of you. What do you think? Do you agree, for starters, with the very idea of America having two distinct literary cultures? Is it fair, or even correct at the very least, to distinguish "MFA writers" from "NYC writers"?
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WHAT THE F*** HAPPENED IN 1820?!? →
Volcanic eruption in Tambora and the year without a summer? (“eighteen hundred and froze to death”)
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Good, Someone Else Started This →
Sh*t My Students Write:
In Heaven’s Gate, after you put on your Nikes, you leave the earth and your body gets abducted by aliens and I don’t really know what happens after that but it looked like they knew where they were going.
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"Letitia Trent Lives in Israel and Writes Poems... →
Hey, what do I see on HTMLGiant but Letty Trent and links to two poems.
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The One Girl at the Boys Party
by Sharon Olds:
When I take my girl to the swimming party I set her down among the boys. They tower and bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek, her math scores unfolding in the air around her. They will strip to their suits, her body hard and indivisible as a prime number, they’ll plunge in the deep end, she’ll subtract her height from ten feet, divide it into hundreds of gallons...
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Cami Park
matchbooklitmag:
We are saddened by the passing of Cami Park. Cami was an extraordinary writer. We are saddened further that we will never get to know her as well as we would have liked.
You can find her work in many journals, including matchbook. Our thoughts go out to her family and friends.
Mike Young has written a post about her at HTMLGIANT where you can find links to more of her work.
...
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So, I haven’t been on Tumblr all day, and I log on and find NO ONE ELSE HAS, EITHER.
Weird.
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Fiction Notes from Colm Tóibín
We had a terrific Q & A today. I sort of lost track of taking notes—Tóibín is a transfixing conversationalist—but here are the “craft of fiction” bits I recall (fill in Irish accent and varying but never entirely absent wryness):
Writing short stories is like translating an idea into sound, into rhythm and sentences that flow with and from breathing (working with a singing...
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doree:
I am glad like 95% of the time that I don’t have roommates but then there are a few situations in which a roommate would be helpful, i.e.:
- watching reality television
- cleaning the bathroom
AND MOST IMPORTANT:
- helping me get dressed in the morning because once again I am wearing what can only be described as… um… god, WHAT AM I EVEN WEARING TODAY?! It involves something that I...
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"She was remembering other Advents..."
…and hedges snowy as sheep from her window, and the Star ready to be pasted up on the sky again…
So this pickup group, these exiles and horny kids, sullen civilians called up in their middle age, men fattening despite their hunger, flatulent because of it, pre-ulcerous, hoarse, runny-nosed, red-eyed, sore-throated, piss-swollen men suffering from acute lower backs and all-day...
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The Secret Goldfish →
I’m surprised and delighted to find my favorite of the David Means stories my workshop read this week available to New Yorker non-subscribers:
He had a weird growth along his dorsal fin, and that gape-mouth grimace you see in older fish. Way too big for his tank, too, having outgrown the standard goldfish age limit. Which is what? About one month? He was six years old—outlandishly old...