1 Feb 2012
Tenorio has taken a uniquely Filipino-American perspective, polyglot and glittering with cinema dreams, and used it to make a bold collection of stories of the rejected, the helpless and the lost. “Montress” is the debut of a singular talent. -Alexander Chee
9 Jan 2012
With last week’s news of James Franco’s forthcoming novel, Actor’s Anonymous, getting picked up by Amazon publishing, here’s a list of some other brave actors and celebrities who moonlight as authors.
12 Dec 2011
An underworld of intrigue thrives at the center of Susan Daitch’s new novel surrounding the Georges Méliès film L’affaire Dreyfus… An engrossing novel for the age of censorship and redaction.
16 Nov 2011
In light of Tea Obreht’s NBA nomination for The Tiger’s Wife, we got to thinking about the other debut novels that have received the honor.
18 Oct 2011
Fragoso plumbs the depths of the human condition with her first book, Tiger, Tiger. Undoubtedly painful, inherently suspenseful, and convincing, this gut-wrenching memoir promises a story of a woman who succesfully reclaims her life.
13 Sep 2011
Emma Straub’s debut, Other People We Married, is a story collection to be savored. Read it too quickly and you’ll run the risk of missing the small moments that come to shape Straub’s characters and her stories.
15 Jul 2011
Helen Phillips’s debut collection of one-page fabulist stories, And Yet They Were Happy, is thronged by wonders. It is the work, as Amy Hempel has said, of a “deeply interesting mind.”
14 Jul 2011
In the beginning, I just wanted to write. Why should I care how humans had come to love literature and art? I didn’t care. Until I asked the question.
First confession. I didn’t start out this way: believing that art is a Godless domain, a tactically-consumed, evolutionarily-wrought siren to the mind—just another victim hunted by our massive, pulverizing desire to devour and catalog every pattern in the universe that presents itself to our perpetually-ravished brains. I didn’t believe any of those things. Not in the beginning. Continue reading "Story Theory: Confessions of a Literary Darwinist"…
It feels strange to look at an old photo, one taken long before you or your parents were born, and recognize something. It’s a disconcerting feeling that uproots you from your present life. Suddenly you find yourself in a faraway place that feels antiquated and remote—but it’s also eerily familiar. You realize that you once knew it very well. Continue reading "Letter to the Editor: A Homecoming"…
Hobby Horse Hill came into my possession by way of my mother, who herself had read it as a girl. At perhaps eight, I discovered it in a box with dozens of her other childhood favorites. Of all of them, only Hobby Horse Hill became important to me, so much so that I read it dozens of times. At one point I could recite the entire opening chapter by heart. Even now, certain lines or scenes will occur to me spontaneously: a sudden embarrassment, for example, will bring to mind the idea of having “the grace to be ashamed,” which one character says approvingly to another, and which I thought, at eight or nine, was romantic.
From the paperback edition of The Unknown Knowns by Jeffrey Rotter. Visit the Museum of the Aquatic Ape to take a virtual tour of Nautika, view their collected works, and browse the gift shop where you can buy the book. Visit Jeffrey at The Books of Rotter.
Comic art copyright © 2010 by Margaret McCartney.
The commencement speech given by novelist Porochista Khakpour to the graduating high school seniors of Desert Academy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 27 May, 2010.
I love poetry. Really, I do. In fact, to repurpose what Alvie told Annie in Woody’s “Annie Hall”… Love is too weak a word for what I feel. I luuurve poetry, you know, I loave poetry, I luff poetry, two F’s. So, this isn’t easy for me to say. But it’s time for a talk. We need to surround poetry with all of its closest friends and family—maybe in that den with the nice window overlooking the maples or the dusty book-stuffed office where poetry counsels its earnest undergrads—and have a talk. You know, that talk—the one that starts with those four hard-to-hear words: you have a problem. Yes, Poetry, it’s time for an intervention.
