Sunday Sentence

CelesteNg
In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, which asks us to share the best sentence(s) we’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

“You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”

Source: Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You (forthcoming novel). I’ve just read a digital galley–stay tuned for a Q&A with Celeste in The Practicing Writer when the book is released!

Monday Markets for Writers

dollar-sign-mdMonday brings the weekly batch of no-fee competitions/contests, paying submission calls, and jobs for those of us who write (especially those of us who write fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction).

  • The April issue of The Practicing Writer is going out to subscribers today! (Check your email, folks!) You can also find the current issue online. As always, you’ll find the issue filled with info on no-fee competitions & paying litmag calls.
  • “We are now inviting submissions to the 2014 THRESHOLDS International Short Story Forum Feature Writing Competition.” Submissions may fall within categories of Author Profile (“exploring the life, writings and influence of a single short story writer”) or We Recommend (“personal recommendations of a collection, anthology, group of short stories or a single short story”). Prizes: 1st Prize of £500 and two Runner-up Prizes of £100. “The winning and runner-up essays and shortlist will be published on the THRESHOLDS Forum during 2014.” No entry fee. No simultaneous submissions. (Hurry if you’re interested in this one–the contest closes April 2, 2014, midnight GMT.) (via Mistakes Writers Make)
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    Wednesday’s Work-in-Progress: While I Was Away

    So, this past week I spent a few days in glorious, warm Turks & Caicos.

    Turks & Caicos

    Anyone who travels with young children–especially young children who don’t exactly embrace hotel “kiddie programs” or day camps–knows that these trips aren’t always 100 percent vacations. But we all had a wonderful time. AND I managed to squeeze in a fair amount of reading. Including:

  • The Paris Review‘s spring 2014 issue. I especially enjoyed the interviews with Adam Phillips and Matthew Weiner.
  • Creative Nonfiction‘s spring 2014 issue, with a standout piece by Wendy Rawlings.
  • The forthcoming translation (by Jeffrey M. Green) of Aharon Appelfeld’s Suddenly, Love (Schocken Books). (Actually, this was my second reading of the galley, in preparation for a review that I’m working on this week.)
  • A digital ARC of Nora Gold’s novel Fields of Exile (Dundurn), coming in May. You’ll be hearing more about this novel–which is being described as the first novel “about” anti-Israelism in contemporary academe–in the not-so-distant future, too. (For starters, I’m planning to run a Q&A with Nora at some point on My Machberet.)
  • I hope that you’ve all had a good week, too!