Author Archives:
The NBCC Gets It Right
This may well be unprecedented: last night several major literary prizes were awarded, and I can’t find a single thing to kvetch about.
The National Book Critics Circle isn’t my favorite literary prize (yes, I am the sort of person who has a favorite literary prize–the Booker, even though it outrages and infuriates me almost every [...]
Rules for Writing
So Elmore Leonard wrote a book called Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. Having read Leonard’s rules (the short version of them, although the fact that he managed to stretch them into a whole book fills me with wonder), I can report that they are either pedestrian (I mean, my high-school English teacher taught me [...]
The Original Yoknapatawpha
So cool. Emory professor Sally Wolff-King made what she calls a “once-in-a-lifetime literary find” while conducting interviews for a book on William Faulkner: a plantation diary filled with names, places, and happenings that Faulkner seems to have used as a source for many of his novels. Wolff-King discovered the connection between Faulkner’s work and the [...]
TGIF
A couple of bookish links to brighten your Friday:
The Cleveland Plain Dealer offers a charming interview with Bill Watterson, the brains behind Calvin and Hobbes:
Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved — and are still grieving — when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?
This isn’t as hard to understand [...]
RIP, Kage Baker
Very sad news: the marvelous science fiction writer Kage Baker died Sunday at the too-young age of 57. She was best known for The Company novels, a tour de force time travel series that begins with In the Garden of Iden and continues through another seven novels, concluding with The Sons of Heaven.
You can read [...]
The Lost Booker
Another year, another gimmick. Last year the Man Booker Prize offered us the Best of the Booker, which pitted previous winners against each other. (Won by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, which also won the Booker of Bookers in 1993. Seriously, is it that good? The more I hear about it, the more perversely reluctant I [...]
