The winner of this year’s Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program Award for fiction is Sofi Stambo. Here’s a rather savage piece of hers over at Guernica Magazine.
Steal Like a Gypsy
Puffed Up
Don't blame Amazon or Goodreads for authors writing rave reviews of their own work. Writers have been self-promoting since the 1700s, when it was called "puffery." As Nicholas Mason writes for Symposium Magazine, "Nearly every British writer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries either participated in or benefitted from ginned-up book reviews." The list of puffed up authors includes Mary Wollstonecraft, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley.
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Enigmatic, Disturbing Sirens
Marina Warner reviews the "enigmatic and brief" and somewhat disturbing “The Professor and the Siren” for The Paris Review. As luck would have it, our own Sonya Chung reviewed the same story for The Millions.
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The Myth of the Recluse
Nathan Bransford points out that nobody is "just an author." Even Thomas Pynchon promotes himself.
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Growing Up
It’s a common trope in writing courses that young artists need a dose of childlike creativity. Self-help books for people with writer’s block are filled with callbacks to childhood interests. But is it possible, as Tasha Golden argues at the Ploughshares blog, that idealizing children isn't the answer to our problems?
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Not Your Usual Book Report
Tired of assigning that regular ol' book report? Take queues from the New York Times "Lesson Plan" on how to go beyond.
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What About Your Head?
“None of us made love, we had only reproaches for one another. I hated that dependency and yet I couldn’t live without it.” This short piece by Mercè Rodoreda from the new issue of Harper’s Magazine is brutal and surprising. The piece is an excerpt from Rodoreda’s War, So Much War, out later this month.
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Sherwood Anderson Read by the Greats
The Library of America celebrates the publication of Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories by posting audio recordings of nine famous writers reading ten of Anderson’s famous works. Hop on over to hear readings by Charles Baxter, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Marcus, Rick Moody, and Patricia Hempl.
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