Chris McLaren (aka Big-Headed Canadian Whiskey Man) forwards along the news that Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith are auctioning off naming rights in their next novels to benefit the African Well Fund: Here are the links to the EBay auctions in which you can bid on the right to name a character in my next …
Go to this reading tonight: MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS Tuesday, November 8th at 7 p.m. Kelly Link continues to cement her reputation as one of the most inventive short fiction authors writing today. Her new collection, Magic For Beginners has been critically acclaimed for its imagination and verve. One of her stories is included in Best …
Stacy Schiff reviews the new biography Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An Unruly Mind by Leo Damrosch in the NYTBR: He did manage to indulge one of his greater talents, that of falling out with those who meant him well. Rousseau set such high standards for friendship that he was better off alone; by his 50’s the hypersensitivity …
Meghan McCarron weighs in on the chick lit = tempest making the rounds (again) this week: The arguement, as well as I can parse it, goes, "Lots of women in the 19th century wrote a lot of popular but forgettable novels that society decried, and a tantalizingly similar thing is going on now. The 19th …
BookWorld is full of spooktastic and Halloweeny reviews this week. Michael Dirda looks at a new translation of Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings (from which that illo comes): Anyone who falls under the spell of The Book of Imaginary Beings should look out for several comparable (or complementary) works. Above all, don’t miss T.H. …
I kid; however, the YA books are the only ones I’ve a prayer of reading AND tend to get overlooked (plus, last year, Pete Hautman’s Godless rocked the house) so from the New York Times: The finalists for the award in young people’s literature include a first-time novelist, Jeanne Birdsall, for "The Penderwicks" (Knopf), a …
National Book Award nods are out:Fiction: The March by E.L. Doctorow (Random House); Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon); Trance by Christopher Sorrentino (FSG); Holy Skirts by Rene Steinke (William Morrow); Europe Central by William T. Vollmann (Viking) Nonfiction: Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion by Alan Burdick (FSG); Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius by …
The first or "blue" issue of the Fairy Tale Review is a promise made good. It hardly seemed possible glancing through the announced table of contents that it could deliver, bold as it was with the names of some of my favorite writers: Stacey Richter, Kim Addonizio, Aimee Bender, Donna Tartt. Not to mention that …
Anne at the Vertical blog is back with a fabulous new edition of the Finger In The Throat (FITT) report, this time tearing into Marlon Brando’s posthumous novel Fan Tan (written with the help of Donald Cammell). It hurts so good: Then, there’s the way Asian men look, very important, of course: "In many Chinese …
Marcy Dermansky‘s Twins is never quite what you think. At first, I worried that I was reading the literary equivalent of Thirteen. There is a voyeuristic feeling that pervades much of the book, something which almost but not quite makes for an uncomfortable sensation while reading (do I even like this? I thought at first, …