ELGX003
Deadlines, Word Counts, and Magnificent Lies: On Hesh Kestin
He had finished his first [novel], Small Change, when he was 23, and it was bought and slated for publication until he balked at changing the title to Season of Lust. The book was never published, nor were the next three. Eventually, as he puts it, “the noise of the hungry bellies of my kids used to keep me up at night.” So he got a real job, this time as a war correspondent—for, as it turned out, Newsday.
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96 Years Later
"Her storytelling is magical and profound, creating connectivity between people and places: a signal of hope at a particularly divided moment in time.” Joining the company of Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, and Sjón, Turkish novelist Elif Şafak has been chosen as the fourth contributor for The Future Library Project. Şafak's novel, Three Daughters of Eve, was featured in the second-half of our 2017 Great Book Preview.
Nevermind
Robert Fitterman, author of Nevermind, a book of poems created from Nirvana’s seminal album, interviews critic and scholar Paul Stephens about his own work and Nirvana’s art. Looking for more music related lit? Check out our Torch Ballads and Jukebox Music section.
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All Stories Are Stories
Last week, I directed you to a piece in The Atlantic by John Yorke on the substance of stories. His argument: that all stories have one thing in common–their plot. Now, Lincoln Michel at Electric Literature suggests that rather it is all story structure models that have one thing in common–and that thing is bullshit.
All Happy Meals Are the Same; Every Unhappy Meal Is Unhappy in Its Own Way
McDonald’s introduced me — and I would venture thousands of other kids — not only to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but also to the notion of a classic. In 1977 and again in 1979, the fast food chain paired up with the publisher I. Waldman & Son to distribute Illustrated Classics Editions in their restaurants.
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Iowa Dispatches, Part 1
The search for the person who will fill what is perhaps academia's most prestigious creative writing job, director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is in its final stages. Four finalists have been announced, Richard Bausch, Lan Samantha Chang, Ben Marcus and Jim Shepard. Each will have an audition of sorts, which includes a reading, a mock workshop, and a talk on craft. Some friends in Iowa have been filling me in on this last part of the selection process, which got underway with Bausch's visit to campus on February 10.I'm told that the process, itself, is somewhat odd, since it's more of a performance than a way to discern teaching ability. During the mock-workshop, Bausch zipped through three stories in and hour and a half, faster than the typical workshop pace, and he digressed from the stories at hand to tell some stories of his own. He quoted some of his favorite works and seemed genuinely passionate about books and the writing life. He said he teaches patience, not writing, and said there are two rules to fiction: you have to use words and you have to be interesting. Though his commentary was somewhat liberal, Bausch's critiques of the stories at hand were traditional, with specific recommendations about tone and pacing. For the public reading later in the evening, Bausch read a recently completed, as yet unpublished story, and during his "talk about craft," he talked about memory and dispensed his 10 Commandments of writing, which included - to paraphrase - doing the work is the only thing that matters. Not if it's good or bad, but that it gets done, everyday.Stay tuned for the next dispatch in a couple of weeks.
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