The Wednesday Web Browser for Writers

  • Scott Nadelson’s new story collection, Aftermath, is this week’s Fiction Writers Review Book of the Week. Follow @FictionWriters for a chance to win a copy. (Having read Nadelson’s two previous collections, I’ll admit that I would love to be a winner this week.)
  • My fellow Last Light Studio author, Ericka Lutz, has posted her first book trailer for The Edge of Maybe, her forthcoming LLS novel. Take a peek (but be forewarned that you should be wearing headphones if you’re listening at work and/or in the vicinity of children).
  • Thanks to the Yiddishkayt site, I discovered a fabulous video profile of author Arnost Lustig (1926-2011) that was produced for Czech TV. Thankfully, there are English subtitles. And the profile perfectly captures Arnost, with whom I had the privilege of studying in the Prague Summer Program in 2004. Arnost would have turned 85 last week.
  • D.G. Myers remembers those writers, like Arnost, who left this world in 2011. (Myers also comes up with his own set of the year’s top 10 literary news stories.)
  • In case you haven’t heard about the latest brouhaha in the poetry world, here’s a pretty good summary. Disclosure: I have never studied with Rita Dove, but I have taken courses with Helen Vendler (a British lit survey as an undergrad and a summer seminar on Yeats after I’d finished graduate school), and I think she is brilliant.
  • Lest you believe that anthology quarrels are new to our modern moment, Benjamin Ivry recalls some older literary history. Hint: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emma Lazarus are key players here.
  • On a less fraught note, author Alan Heathcock recommends a poem a day. (And so do I.)