“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.
He Pleaded
Lost Steinbeck
“With Your Wings,” a lost Steinbeck story from the 1940’s, has just been published for the first time by literary magazine The Strand.
The Power & Popularity of Poetry
In a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jonathan Farmer responds to the recent pieces in the New York Times that ask poets to debate the question “does poetry matter?” As Farmer points out, ” it’s a bit like asking a bunch of religious figures if religion matters,” but the conversation is worth following and pairs well with our own recent pieces on poetry’s power and popularity.
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Nabokov Pitches Hitchcock
Remember that time Vladimir Nabokov pitched Alfred Hitchcock a melodramatic love story about a girl and an astronaut? No? Read all about it.
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Graphomania
“I’m a total database nerd. In college I worked as a troubleshooter for a database of medical research, trying to predict and prevent mistakes in the data entry process to avoid screwing up the records. Is anything more satisfying than a successfully written query delivering precisely the required results? It’s so much more direct than writing fiction. A query either works or it doesn’t.” Steve Himmer’s Nervous Breakdown self-interview.
2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Nominees Announced
The nominees for the 2011 PEN/Faulkner fiction award have been announced. The books in the running are Millions Hall of Famer A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Egan profiled at The Millions); The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Eisenberg profiled at The Millions); National Book Award winner Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon; Model Home by Eric Puchner (one of our “20 More Under 40“); and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives by Brad Watson (Brad Watson’s Year in Reading 2009).
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Artistic Dachshunds
On the NY Daily News’ Page Views blog, Alexander Nazaryan writes about the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show’s most neglected — yet also most literary — member breed: the dachshund. “No dog,” Nazaryan writes, “has been more widely loved by writers and artists than the dachshund.” Comedian Streeter Seidell agrees that the dachshund was slighted, and calls for a “fan favorite” award next year.
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I took this up a couple years ago: http://ellenakins.com/stop-using-those-strange-dialogue-tags-she-chided-exclaimed-exhorted-quipped-chirped-opined/
Just as long as we aren’t forced to go as far as Elmore Leonard in his unjustly celebrated writing tips: “#3 Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.”