Monthly Archives: March, 2011
Young Lions, Old Tigers
This week saw shortlists for two very different fiction awards, one for a debut author and the other celebrating an older writer’s complete body of work. The New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award contestants, all of them 35 or younger, stand to win $10,000 for a first novel or short story collection. It’s [...]
Popping Up in Pittsburgh
Yesterday’s PWxyz Morning Report posted a link pointing to Karen The Small Press Librarian’s blog, where she announced a Pop-Up Indie Bookstore to Inhabit Former Borders, in Pittsburgh. I tell you, I can’t remember the last time a headline inspired such excitement over here! The real story, however, was both more and less than what [...]
New Yorker fiction (Mar 28) – “U.F.O. in Kushiro”
A Book Bench post accompanying this story explains: This week, the magazine features the work of two Japanese fiction writers … [Haruki] Murakami’s story “U.F.O. in Kushiro,” which first appeared in our March 19, 2001, issue, and later appeared in his collection “After the Quake,” runs again. Murakami wrote the stories in the collection in [...]
Woolf Whistle
70 years ago today, Virginia Woolf wrote to her beloved husband, Leonard: Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best [...]
Song of Ice and Fire and Head Cheese
I’m not one of George R.R. Martin’s devoted fans—although neither am I not a fan; he just never crossed my radar—but I know a lot of people who are really tickled that HBO has turned Game of Thrones into a series, scheduled to air in April. The folks at HBO are no less psyched. Hoping [...]
The OED, OMG
The Oxford English Dictionary has completed its latest quarterly online update, with revisions to over 30% of the existing words and a number of new ones added into the mix. Aside from the fact of its Internet presence, which is already 10 years old, the OED has planted both feet firmly in the 21st century. [...]
The Long History of Little Magazines
Today’s history lesson comes courtesy of Luna Park, a fine site devoted to literary magazines. Editor Travis Kurowski has republished Some Notes on the History of the Literary Magazine, a timeline originally printed in Mississippi Review. Given the abundance of both paper and electronic litmags these days, it doesn’t hurt to have a general picture [...]
Good Taste: Penguin’s Great Food Series
Those people at Penguin Books have the right idea: The way to our bookshelves is through our stomachs. Their new paperback series, out in April, is Great Food, 20 examples of “the finest food writing from the last 400 years.” The usual suspects are represented—M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, Calvin Trillin—but also Alexandre Dumas, Samuel Pepys [...]
Interview Roundup at HTMLGIANT
At eighteen I began reading biographies of writers: where had they gone to school? Were they married, childless, published before age thirty? Were they mad, alcoholic, suicidal, dead at forty? I was not so unhappy growing up that I did not fear the loneliness that seemed to come with being a writer; many of my [...]
New Yorker fiction (Mar 21) – “Rollingwood”
The New Yorker has made the story available online only to subscribers. Against an array of characters and circumstances roiling with indifference, hostility, and blank walls, a father is trying hard to take care of his young son who is afflicted with asthma. Things aren’t going well. In an interview accompanying this story, author Ben [...]
