My friend Ingrid sent me a link to this wonderfully strange meditation on writers’ anxiety by Catherynne M. Valente from the November 2008 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine. She talks about the anxiety of not yet being published and, once published, the anxiety over whether you’ll be published ever again. Valente is the author of several [...]
Barnes & Noble has announced its Discover prizes, with the top fiction prize going to Gin Phillips’ The Well and the Mine (Hawthorn Books); second prize to Benjamin Taylor’s The Book of Getting Even (Steerforth Press) and third prize to Zachary Lazar’s Sway (Little, Brown) Top nonfiction prize went to David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy (Houghton [...]
I’m still thinking about Ron Rosenbaum’s wonderfully passionate article about rediscovering the pleasure of reading in the online magazine Slate this week. I wrote on Tuesday about my recent re-commitment to reading for pleasure, and want to consider the logical extension of that commitment to my writing.
The quote I used in Tuesday’s post bears new [...]
Ron Rosenbaum, a regular contributor to Slate magazine and author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler, has a piece on Slate about three detective novels that have, for him, restored the pleasure to reading. This article is well worth your time because of its passionate defense of the quality of writing in books that [...]
The clip above features a panel discussion with agents and editors about what motivates them and what they look for in books and authors. It’s an interesting discussion, the kind you hope to hear at any conference.
And it reminded me of a book I’ve had for a while, Writing the Breakout Novel: Insider Advice for [...]