Friday Finds for Writers

Treasure ChestWriting-related resources, news, and reflections to enjoy over the weekend.

  • No-nonsense advice from “Margie” at Behind the Margins: “Wanna Quit Your Day Job? Economic Realities 101.”
  • “We call them Summer Submission Parties.” So begins Risa Polansky Shiman’s post for the Brevity blog.
  • More than 20 unpublished poems by the late Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, most of them taking up romantic themes, have been discovered in boxes of his papers in Chile and will be published in Latin America and Spain in 2014 and 2015, according to reports from Spain.” No news yet about English translations.
  • D.G. Myers, for Books & Culture: “Perhaps the best examples [“of provocative and satisfying religious fiction”] are the work of two young Catholic novelists still in their thirties—William Giraldi and Christopher Beha.” (And then, a more personal essay by Myers on Good Letters, the blog of the journal Image.)
  • Finally, as a member of the Sara Lippmann Fan Club, I must point you to this new interview with Sara, which, as a bonus, presents the title story from her forthcoming collection, Doll Palace.
  • Happy weekend!

    Sunday Sentence

    Impossible-Exile_online_01-260x374
    In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

    The privileged inheritor of a weaving-mill fortune, the refined manuscript collector, the model son, model friend, model benefactor, model socialite and model assimilated Jew could not possibly have anything in common with the fixated deviants inhabiting his pages.

    Source: André Aciman, review of George Prochnik’s new book on Stefan Zweig, for The Wall Street Journal.

    Wednesday’s Work-in-Progress: A New Review and a Lesson Re-Learned

    BNScreenshotLast week brought the publication of my first piece for The Barnes & Noble Review: a review of Anthony Doerr’s oh-so-impressive new novel All the Light We Cannot See. I’m really proud of this review and happy to share it.

    Something interesting happened with this assignment that I thought I’d mention here as a sort of how-to reminder.

    If you’re a reviewer and/or familiar with the galley versions that are circulated to reviewers and other early readers ahead of publication, you may have noticed these cautionary words that often accompany them: (more…)