Haven’t heard about the Conversations and Connections Conference yet? I got the inside scoop on this writer’s conference, which will be held on September 22, 2012 in Philadelphia, from Dave Housley and Susan Muaddi-Darraj, co-founders of the conference and editors at Barrelhouse. If you are interested in speed dating
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The
A month ago the author Mat Johnson (Pym, Drop, Incognegro) went crowdsourcing on his Facebook page for new music to write to. He’d been listening and writing to Endtroducing by DJ Shadow for years and he’d exhausted the thing. It got me to thinking about what makes good writing music. I
Sometimes when writing, I hover the cursor over the I symbol in the Microsoft Word toolbox for several seconds as I grapple with whether or not to italicize a word or a phrase in Spanish. It is in such moments that I am faced with broader questions about my
Canada Richard Ford Ecco, May 2012 432 pages $27.99 I found myself humming Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” while reading Richard Ford’s Canada—only instead of “Joe Diamaggio,” I sang “Frank Bascombe,” the hero of the Ford Trilogy that began with the Sportswriter, peaked with Independence Day, and closed with
32 years. That’s how long it’s been since I last set foot on Australia’s east coast. Byron Bay was a soft landing after the long absence, because here was a surfer’s paradise, a gourmet’s paradise, a wine aficionado’s paradise . . . okay, okay so waxing overly lyrical etc.,
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The
For about four years, I lived within walking distance of the Menil Museum in Houston. It’s a free museum lodged in the Montrose neighborhood and it ate hours of my life. One season the museum had a giant mounting of Paul Klee’s work, the majority borrowed from other collections.
Junot Díaz once told me that he writes for his six best friends and the rest of the world. This was a few summers ago in a VONA fiction workshop in San Francisco. We had been discussing the meaty issue of how much to explain in our short stories
Readings in World Literature Srikanth Reddy Omnidawn, 2012 42 pages $11.95 Editor’s note: P. Scott Stanfield holds a Ph.D. in English and teaches literature at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Recently, I challenged him to see how many references to other works and artists he could make in a single 500-word