Quick Hits
January 22, 2008
Appearing Elsewhere 0
by C. Max Magee
Garth has an essay on Amazon’s celebrity reviewers up at Slate. Full disclosure: It was late at night, in a fit of furtive self-Googling, that I discovered the first Amazon customer review of my debut book of fiction. “Superb,” wrote Grady Harp of Los Angeles. “Fascinating … addictive.” Not to mention “profound.” Such extravagance should [...]
January 20, 2008
On Teaching and the Question of Contentment 3
by Emily Colette Wilkinson
Gogol’s The Overcoat and Flaubert’s A Simple Heart have in common narrators who are, at least initially, satisfied with what I think many would consider very meager lives. They are both poor, single, friendless, both workers whose work (a clerk who copies documents in a Russian government office, and a maid of all work in [...]
January 19, 2008
Blogging the Beijing Book Fair 0
by Patrick Brown
A couple of weeks ago I started a new job doing internet marketing for Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA. At about the same time, the president of Vroman’s, Allison Hill, left for the Beijing Book Fair as part of a delegation of American and British booksellers. Considering it took place on the other side of [...]
January 16, 2008
The Art of Rejection 10
by Edan Lepucki
I’ve been submitting my fiction to magazines big and small for six years, since I was a senior in college. It took two years to receive my first acceptance, and another two years to receive my second. Since then, my record has improved: I had a story published last year, and two more are forthcoming. [...]
January 10, 2008
DFW Rides Again? 5
by Garth Risk Hallberg
For those of us wondering whether David Foster Wallace will ever publish another novel, the February issue of Harper’s seems to augur something good. The magazine’s “Readings” section features an excerpt from a “work in progress” Wallace first read at last year’s Le Conversazioni festival (heretofore notable mainly for its photo-ops of writers in short [...]
January 7, 2008
New Yorker Fiction from 2003-2007: An Analysis 4
by C. Max Magee
Recently I got a very interesting email from a reader. Frank Kovarik writes and teaches English in St. Louis. For the last five years, he has also been keeping meticulous track of the fiction that appears in the New Yorker. Not just the titles and authors, but things like gender, country of origin, and frequency [...]
