Tom Jenks, co-founder of Narrative Magazine (which charges writers $23 to submit), is releasing a 400-page, six-chapter craft book on the art of imaginative fiction titled A Poetics of Fiction. The information inside the book is billed as “more than useful—it’s essential and not readily available anywhere else”—maybe that’s why it retails for $225.
Chapter One: Open a Savings Account
He Pleaded
“For the love of all things literary, please quit banning words like ‘said’ in your classrooms,” he howled. He demanded. He cackled. He barked. He spat. He bellowed.
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“His choice solidifies the role of the artist or poet in his/her city.”
Katie Smither explains the recent hullabaloo over poet CAConrad’s ejection from the Philadelphia Magazine offices. The poet even appears in the article’s comments to explain his side of the events.
Linguistics
Leave it to the Oxford English Dictionary folks to put a damper on the linsane amount of eponyms based on Jeremy Lin’s surname.
Tuesday New Release Day: French; Lerner; Finnegan; Iyer; Antrim; Mitchell
New this week: The Secret Place by Tana French; 10:04 by Ben Lerner; Barbarian Days by William Finnegan; Wittgenstein, Jr. by Lars Iyer; The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim; and The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Plant That (Literary) Flag
“In no particular order, except one of hallelujah, here’s a necessarily partial list of some other living Korean American writers whose work or person, or both, I’ve had the great good luck of encountering”….you’ll have to read the interview for the lengthy list as well as the thoughts of four Korean American writers who gathered at the behest of R.O. Kwon to discuss the influence and impact of Alexander Chee. It’s full of beautiful insights from Kwon, Nicole Chung, Alice Sola Kim, and Matthew Salesses such as “Alex said he ‘wanted to plant that flag in the culture,’ and until he said that I don’t know if I’d thought about it as a reason to write. The need to exist in the canon, in the literary world. I found that very powerful, and very brave”. Chee’s newest book is an essay collection, How to Write An Autobiographical Novel, that we eagerly anticipated last month.
A Few Chapters Short of a Novel
Do people enjoy writers like Pynchon and Nabokov in part because they’re so odd? A new paper suggests that we tend to like art when we believe its creator is eccentric. The Atlantic reads through a study that’s a bit of a strange one.
Audio Ginsberg
This past week saw the release of the final volume in Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs 1949-1993, a collection of recordings—some of which never before released—by Allen Ginsberg. This volume contains the “stunning 1956 Berkeley Town Hall reading of Ginsberg’s seminal poem ‘Howl.’” The volumes are for sale on iTunes, but you can also listen to an “8 song sampler” over on OpenCulture for free.
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Seventeen Years Later
“It is a darker book, I don’t deny that, but that’s the story that came to me and wanted to be told.” Seventeen years after Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials trilogy ended, the writer is releasing La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of his new trilogy, The Book of Dust. Pullman also said the second volume of the trilogy of already complete, according to The Guardian. Check out our own Janet Potter on grief, books, and His Dark Materials.