At BOMB Magazine, Patricia Engel speaks to fellow author Ingrid Rojas Contreras about her latest novel, Infinite Country, and how storytelling was instilled within her from an early age. ” I was bred on narratives,” Engel says, “and so my mind unconsciously assembles lived experience into story, searching for meaning, symbols, working out character psychologies and trails of cause and effect. Storytelling has allowed me to mine and map my own life, and also given me an outlet with which to understand human chaos. I stay with writing because it’s endlessly nourishing, and I also see it as an offering to those who came before me and those who will come after.”
Mining and Mapping Life with Patricia Engel
The Maya School Needs Help
Last year, Netherland author Joseph O’Neill helped open the Maya School, a school for Syrian refugee children in Turkey. Now he’s asking for donations of additional funds to keep the school operational. “We have set up a transparent and cost-effective partnership with Turkish counterparts of great integrity and knowhow,” O’Neill writes. “Of the $16,000 we raised last year, $3000 still remains. That tells you how far your dollars will go.”
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Book Signings in the Digital Age
The New York Times looks at new technological efforts to make book signings work in the age of the ebook. One idea is an e-reader add-on that lets the reader snap a photo with the author, which the author can then sign with a “digital stylus.” The photo is meant to make its way to Twitter and Facebook, of course. “Bragging potential? Endless,” says the Times. Authors: get ready to say “cheese”?
Agustina Bazterrica on Cannibalism and Dystopian Fiction
Agustina Bazterrica discusses her novel, Tender Is the Flesh, and reflects on fiction’s ability to raise questions and open minds.
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Are You Feeling Lucky?
Hobart’s got a “Wish List” for submissions to its next issue, and with any luck they might just pull it off.
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Who Pays Blogs
True South
Amidst all the controversy surrounding Go Set a Watchman, one question that gets left out is how realistic, exactly, the book is in its depiction of its setting. At Salon, Scott Timberg sits down with Professor Angela Thorburg, who makes a case that regardless of its literary qualities, Watchman is “a very accurate perspective of what’s going on here in the South.”
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“Will you sign my house?”
“Is this skyscraper autobiographical?” People say some pretty ridiculous things about writing. To put it in perspective, Mallory Ortberg presents “If We Talked About Architecture Like We Talk About Writing.”
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