June 2010
109 posts
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“I put the magazine away and took out the dictionary. I was looking for a word...”
– Ben Greenman, “The Hunter and the Hunted”
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Barn, by Ben Greenman →
I know I’ve posted Ben Greenman’s stories already for the Story of the Day, but I’m just about to head out to an event in Bryant Park for Underwater New York, which Greenman will be a part of, and I couldn’t resist sharing this story. “Barn,” appeared in FiveChapters.com (one of my favorite online literary journals), and can be found in Greenman’s new...
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Seattle Writer Wins 2010 Bad Writing Contest →
Congrats to Molly Ringle of Seattle, who was the grand prize winner of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. What a metaphor. World’s thirstiest gerbil…?
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“What a life, he thought. When I was poor, all I wanted was to be rich. When I...”
– Dan Baum, Nine Lives
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A Day in the Life of a Writer →
A fun look at a “day in the life” of a writer, student, etc., from the awesome folks at Lit Drift:
“We’re not all going to be able to wake up to the sunrise at our lakeside writers retreat. We’re going to have gigs and side jobs. We’re going to be grumpy in the mornings. We’re going to not want to write all the time, but we’ll force ourselves to because that’s our...
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Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion... →
Nam Le’s short story collection, The Boat, is extraordinary. Besides winning a slew of awards and accolades, the actual experience of reading Le’s writing has pushed me in my own writing. I hope you enjoy this Story of the Day, originally published in Zoetrope:
“Deadlines came, exhausting, and I forced myself up to meet them. Then, in the great spans of time between, I fell back...
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Tough tomes: are challenging books worth the... →
Alastair Harper, writing for the Guardian Books Blog, explores the difficult question: to read, or not to read? Are challenging books worth the effort? In the unending debate of “literary” vs. “general” fiction, I find Harper’s entry entertaining and energetic:
On my last trip to the library I took an unexpected turn and, facing a series of alarmingly engorged...
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Death of the Literati: Good Riddance to... →
Can popular fiction and literary fiction both be viewed as great literature? I personally believe so; let’s stop dismissing authors, entire genres, and dividing readerships. Great writing is great writing.
A rant on the Literati, from Jason Pinter:
“What is noteworthy to me is that the best literature is in reality popular literature as well. For too long, the literary have accepted...
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“He’d never touched her and her hand was small and her waist so slight and...”
– Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
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Sea Monster, by Ben Loory →
After reading Ben Loory’s short story, “The TV,” in The New Yorker, I was hooked. Since then, I have been grabbing up his stories that have been published online. Today’s Story of the Day, “Sea Monster,” is one of my favorites. It originally appeared in Annalemma:
“The men of the town can only stare at him. They were there, with him, on the boat. They saw...
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From Brevity's Nonfiction Blog: Are Games the New... →
Writer, teacher, and editor Steven Church takes a look at Tom Bissell’s new book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, one that I’ve followed with interest, and excitement:
“In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I’ve never played any of the games Bissell discusses (save for Pac Man, Tempest, and other “classic” 80’s games mentioned in the few gaming history...
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Literary Worship: Borges on Pleasure Island →
From The New York Times Sunday Book Review comes a wonderful essay by Rivka Galchen on literary worship, Borges, and Robert Louis Stevenson:
“Which brings us back to worship. If serial rereading is one way to define worship, then one of Borges’s most revered gods was Robert Louis Stevenson. This even though in Borges’s time, Stevenson’s work was basically considered kid stuff. The first...
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“‘Thing about Wash was, he’d never drop the clown, no matter how...”
– Patton Oswalt, Serenity: Float Out
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Creative writing as literary 'intervention' →
From the Guardian: bringing creative writing to ordinary schools, not just a privileged few. You rock, Katie Waldegrave.
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Small Potatoes: The Writing Business →
Brought to you by The Rumpus. Very well done.
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Thwok, Thwack, Wimbledon's Back →
Love me some writing. Love me some Wimbledon.
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“They drank. It was morning and they drank and the stuff tasted terrible but they...”
– Reif Larsen, “The Puppet” (from One Story)
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10 Under 10 →
A hilarious op-ed from the NYT:
“In the wake of The New Yorker’s recent “20 Under 40” list of gifted fiction writers who have not yet reached age 40, the literary community has turned its attention to even younger emerging talent.”
Happy Sunday, everyone.
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A Short Explanation of Things
On fwriction, on the right side of the screen, there are pages listed. It occurred to me late last night, after eating nachos and watching Stand by Me, that I’ve never explained these pages or their functions. Here, then, is a short explanation of things:
Me: that’s me, Danny.
Fictions & Nonfictions
* fwrictional Friends: a blogroll of non-Tumblr blogs that I love.
* Histoire...
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20 Writers to Watch: An Alternate List →
A great list of writers from the folks over at Dzanc Books (in response to The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list). On this list, I’m excited to say, are four writers that have been featured in fwriction’s Story of the Day: Matt Bell, Blake Butler, Justin Taylor, and Laura van den Berg.
From the article:
“As we - the independent publishers, agents, bloggers and...
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“She says, I loved you so much once. I loved you to the point of distraction. I...”
– Raymond Carver, “Intimacy”
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Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes, by David Foster... →
Because I am fully entrenched in Wimbledon right now—between Federer and Rafa nearly being upset early, and John Isner’s historical eleven hour win, I have been utterly gripped (unfortunately, an exhausted Isner just lost his second round match)—I wanted to post something for the weekend that would bring my love of tennis to fwriction. This memoir from DFW was the first thing...
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“Velocity’s just one part of it. Now we’re getting technical. Tennis is often...”
– David Foster Wallace, “Federer as Religious Experience”
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Where Have All the Sontags Gone? →
David Haglund, writing for The Awl, responds to Lee Siegel’s piece in the NY Observer, in which he called modern fiction “culturally irrelevant.”
Fiction, my friends, is in no way dead. Promise.
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Ten Things* I Hate About You, World, by Canadian...
1) The Ass
“I loathe you. Knowing you are alive nullifies everything I’ve ever done in my life. It sucks the joy from everything I’ve accomplished, and everything I want to do in the future. I have no interest in life anymore. As long as you live, my head is filled with total sadness. I weep, alone, in my bedroom. I was once a man. A proud man. People respected me, and I was...
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“normalcy.
Although most dictionaries accept it as standard, it is still...”
– Bill Bryson, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors
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You all make me happy
1,211 followers now, which just happens to be my birthday. I am overwhelmed by your support and readership. Thank you, so much.
(I should clarify, because as I read this now, it’s a bit unclear: 12/11, not today, is my birthday. I must learn to write accurately. Me fail English? That’s unpossible.)
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Books' power to connect is as potent as ever →
Thanks to my friend, Hannah, for this:
Susan Straight, author of the upcoming novel Take One Candle Light a Room, discusses her experiences teaching a fiction seminar, and the connection students have with their reading material:
They got glimpses of the world through the eyes of their fellow students.
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Orpheus at the Second Gate of Hades, by Yusef... →
I don’t post much poetry on fwriction, but this stuck to my bones. I love Komunyakaa’s poetry, and though I’ve gotten away from it in recent years, it’s always nice to be reminded of the beauty of language:
I don’t wish to speak of omens
but sometimes it’s hard to guess.
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“We were in so many ways the luckiest young people we knew.
And we were...”
– Fredrick Barton, “The Way We Were”
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Gaiman's choice: shouldn't good writing tell a... →
Neil Gaiman looks to dissolve the line between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction.” Personally, I’d love it:
What Gaiman alludes to and Chabon tackles directly is the genre which we now know as “literary”: the fictional worlds inhabited by people who think a lot and say a lot and feel a lot, but don’t actually do very much over the course of the...
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Puttanesca, by Emma Straub →
I’m not going to lie: I have fallen in love with Emma Straub and her writing. After getting my hands on her debut, Fly-Over State, during a recent raid of Bookcourt, I find myself drawn in by Straub’s voice, her vision of the world. She deals with characters in the best possible way, in the way a great writer should: with care.
Today’s Story of the Day comes from...
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Has Fiction Become Culturally Irrelevant? →
That’s the claim made by Lee Siegel in this article, from The New York Observer. I vehemently disagree with Siegel, though, in his assertion that fiction has somehow lost its “creative mischief.” In fact, I find our current state of fiction to be one of utter excitement, an environment where new voices are constantly emerging, and the dissection of language and characters and...
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“I don’t want anyone to die in my stories anymore. From here on out it has...”
– David Means, “What I Hope For”
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Stephanie G'Schwind, Editor of Colorado Review, on... →
From Anis Shivani, of The Huffington Post:
“Literary journals like Boulevard, Pleiades, Antioch Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Boston Review, Harvard Review—and Colorado Review—are where most of America’s great new writers first find exposure. Nowhere...
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Blacking Out The Friction →
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Ben Greenman: My Loves and Letters →
Ben Greenman, whose new short story collection, What He’s Poised To Do, I am currently reading, laments the lost art of the letter:
“Email isn’t a villain by any means, but it greatly abridges the process by which written language, and the emotions it carries, moves between writer and reader.”
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Going for the Orange Julius, by Myla Goldberg →
My roommate and I were talking about this story over the weekend, and I’d forgotten just how much I adore it. It’s a gem from Goldberg, author of Bee Season and Wickett’s Remedy; after being published by failbetter in 2001, the piece was included in Fiction Gallery, a short story anthology that I highly recommend.
Enjoy “Going for the Orange Julius,” today’s...
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Hello, Tumblr Tuesday. Nice to see you again.
“Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.” -Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
If you like reading fwriction (and I really, really hope that you do), feel free to recommend it in the Tumblr directory.
Thanks. You’re swell.
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AIGA's 50 Books/50 Covers →
This is a fantastic list of book covers, chosen by AIGA.
If you’re interested in design, you should be following AIGA NY on Twitter, as well as visiting the AIGA National Design Center in New York, where these covers will be exhibited in December 2010.
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“He lay still now. Along the bottom edge of the shade, he could see the faint,...”
– Adam Haslett, Union Atlantic
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The Tense, Thrown Like a Switch: Paul Farley's The... →
I have posted about this book and author before, but I really love both, so enjoy this look at The Atlantic Tunnel by The Rumpus’s Xarissa Holdaway:
“Farley’s poems live in the present, the past and the future simultaneously, fully conscious of their unrest.”
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Marginalia by Nabokov, Plath, Twain, and Coleridge →
Ian Frazier takes a look at the margin notes and annotations made by some of history’s most storied writers:
As a marginalia scribbler, Mark Twain was perhaps the most entertaining and voluminous of all, with comments that bloomed from space breaks and chapter headings and end pages, sometimes turning corners and continuing upside down. In Twain’s remarks as he made his way through “The...
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John Updike’s Archive - A Great Writer at Work →
The New York Times takes a look at Updike’s writing archives, now housed in the basement of Houghton Library at Harvard University, Updike’s alma mater.
Though much has been made about Updike’s ability to write “ rapidly and easily and [revise] very little — a reputation he encouraged — the archive demonstrates the painstaking care he took to establish the tone and...
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“There are very few things sacred left in the world.”
– Phil Frabosilo, cab driver
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Second Lining, Andre Dubus, and Fathers →
This morning, along the Hudson River, I watched a Second Line. Amongst other, more overtly emotional reactions, the collision of Nola and NYC reminded me of a painting, one I adore but cannot comprehend. A Jackson Pollock, perhaps. Though it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, I imagined it was for my father, whom I miss everyday. I tapped my foot to the rhythm of the band, to the drum pounding...
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Tom Bissell, Roger Ebert, and Why Video Games... →
The New York Times Sunday Book Review takes a look at Tom Bissell’s new book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. It’s a great read, especially for those of the video game generation.
Roger Ebert has been outspoken on the subject of video games, and I believe he’s currently taken to Twitter Bissell’s book. Good stuff.
From the review:
If photographs are “experience...
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“If I loved you, I would tell you this:”
– Robin Black, “If I Loved You”
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“Perhaps even these things, one day, will be pleasing to remember.”
– Virgil, Aeneid