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A Winter Weekend’s Reading

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

If you’re looking for some writing-oriented reading this weekend you can find plenty to keep you occupied (and thinking) in online offerings from the January-February 2006 Poets & Writers magazine. I found so much of direct interest to me in this issue I’m still marveling over it.

My interest was piqued first when I saw that the magazine had published a complimentary letter penned by a friend of mine. That was a good sign! (No, that’s not one of the online offerings I’m pointing you to. But I have to say it made me smile as I read on.)

I can’t say I’ve read all of David Foster Wallace’s work, but his story, “The Depressed Person,” remains a favorite. So I was more than just intrigued to find Joe Woodward’s piece, “In Search of David Foster Wallace,” in the magazine.

Then, because I’m a pretty active book reviewer (I should probably be writing a review right this minute instead of blogging–the book in question is reprovingly within my peripheral vision) and try to help others learn about book reviewing I was also interested in Timothy Schaffert’s Q&A with David Ulin, who now edits the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

As if that weren’t enough, Daniel Nester’s article on Stephen Elliott’s new anthology addresses one of my favorite topics: “politically inspired fiction.”

And finally, there’s Kevin Larimer’s report on the outcome of the most recent Winnow Press First Fiction competition. Or maybe lack of outcome is a better term, since no prize was awarded. I certainly can’t say I’m an uninvolved party here, both because I know very well which little bird alerted Mr. Larimer to this piece of news and because yes, I am one of the 300 people whose manuscripts the press found, in the words of publisher Corinne Lee, “so disappointing.” I suppose I’ll just remain grateful to (and perhaps in a very human way will prefer the judgments of) the editors of the five journals and two contests that published and “prized” the stories included in this manuscript collection (a shortened one, due to the contest’s page limits) in the past. And I’ll be grateful, too, to Winnow Press for returning my contest fee.

Reviewing the Review

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Bloggers (and others) are abuzz about Sunday’s article, “The Book Review: Who Critiques Whom–and Why?”, written by New York Times Public Editor, Byron Calame. In this piece Calame unveils something many of us find mysterious: the book-review process at his own paper. Calame explains that his own inquiry was prompted by the NYTBR‘s recent list of “100 Notable Books of the Year.” After the list was published earlier this month, he says, “calculations from several readers and bloggers soon turned up in my in-box. Of the 61 nonfiction books on the list, they noted, six were by Times staffers–enough to pique my interest in the overall book-review process at the paper.” It should be enough to pique your interest, too.

The Latest from JBooks.com

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

The latest offerings from JBooks.com: The Online Jewish Book Community are now available. As someone who has not infrequently submitted work to anthologies, frankly enjoys reading them, and sometimes even daydreams about possible anthology topics myself, I found Sanford Pinsker’s piece, inspired by a new anthology edited by Jerome Charyn, a very intriguing read. (Of course, I’m also partial to my own current JBooks.com contribution, a review of Abigail Pogrebin’s Stars of David.)