Recommended Reading: Hestia Peppe on Lindsay Hunter’s Ugly Girls.
Skin-Deep
Stories Are Clumsy Beasts
Over at ZYZZYVA, Christian Kiefer talks to playwright Octavio Solis and novelist Scott Hutchins about the craft of writing and the difference between writing plays and writing novels. “It takes a huge amount of hard labor, man, to harness the forces that we are using to make our stories. They may emerge whole cloth out of our need to know how we operate as humans, but they’re often clumsy unfinished beasts.” Kiefer’s new novel, The Animals, is one of the most anticipated books of 2015.
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“A Novel” Reminder
Eliza Brooke for Vox explains why the seemingly obvious phrase "A Novel" still appears on book covers and spines today.
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Fall 2009 Story Contest
Narrative Magazine announces its Fall 2009 Story Contest, open to fiction and non-fiction writers. Submission deadline November 30th.
Shakar’s Story Continues
The Observer picks up Luminarium author Alex Shakar’s narrative where his piece here at The Millions left off. (via @sarahw)
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He Said, He Said (Tom Wolfe Edition)
Thomas Mallon seemed to enjoy Tom Wolfe’s new novel. Our own Nick Moran? Not so much.
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The DeLillo Dogpile, Cont’d.
What’s with the DeLillo pile-on? we asked last week, semi-coherently. Open Letters Monthly provides an astute and meticulous answer in its monthly covering-the-coverage feature, “Peer Review.”