Sunday Sentence

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

The men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidying closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family’s books while simultaneously attending to their children’s health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale.

Source: Philip Roth, The Plot Against America, a copy of which I returned to this week after hearing Alec Baldwin read the opening pages–including the sentence above–at a Roth tribute on Tuesday afternoon.

Wednesday’s WIP: A Recent Review

textile-orly-castel-bloom-paperback-cover-artBack in January, I discovered that that The Feminist Press would be publishing Textile, an English translation of a novel by one of my favorite Israeli authors, Orly Castel-Bloom. The book was slated for release in the spring; I was thrilled to receive an assignment to review it and dug in eagerly to my review copy.

Publication of the book was delayed, so the deadline for my review was, too. Then it wasn’t until August that my editor asked for some revisions. I complied. When a Google alert let me know that the review was published just last week, I discovered that further cuts and other revisions had been made.

I’m always happy to have a byline in this particular publication (not to mention the paycheck). But I can’t deny that I’m disappointed that this piece ended up so very much shorter than (and otherwise different from) the original review that I worked so hard to craft. So I’m using today’s blog post to share that original version with you. I hope that you enjoy it. (more…)

Friday Finds for Writers

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

  • If you were under a rock or otherwise off the grid yesterday, you may be one of the last people to not yet know that Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. Some of the Munro-related material that I’m looking forward to sifting through this weekend includes a treasure trove of appreciations that appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review several years ago, a blog post and review essay by D.G. Myers, and a Missouri Review essay by Cheryl Strayed.
  • A timely post (given the above) on “what makes a good short story,” by Best American Short Stories series editor Heidi Pitlor. (h/t @JonnyPapers, though soon after he shared it, I saw it everywhere.)
  • For your weekend listening: a podcast of a conversation between André Aciman and Aleksandar Hemon on displacement, exile, and memory.
  • Couldn’t wait to dig in when I saw that Rebecca Klempner had written a post on writing in the second person. (Then I was surprised and honored to see myself mentioned therein.)
  • I’ll admit it: I couldn’t accomplish as much as I do interview/Q & A-wise if I didn’t rely on email mode. Some writers think email interviews are just THE WORST. But there are ways to improve them, as Carol Tice points out.
  • Have a great weekend, everyone.

    Sunday Sentence

    Dick-Cheney-WC-9246063-2-402
    Another Sunday in which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, which asks others to share the best sentence(s) we’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

    “What do I pretend to know about love, its vagaries and mysteries, its inscrutability, its insistent pull?”

    From Celeste Ng’s marvelous story “The Kind of Man,” on Five Chapters. (Wondering why I’ve included a photo of Dick Cheney here? Go read the story!)