For those of you in NY in February, consider attending this wonderful event in support of novelist Charles Bok and his family. A great idea and excellent example of why writers congregate in NYC despite the weather, the prices and the subway yelling.
Tagged: Charles Bok, Fundraiser, Literary Rent Party, New York, Writing
The literary journal N+1 has an article in the latest issue called “MFA vs. NYC” in which it debates the rising value of MFA programs versus the New York publishing world, an education in itself. If being a writer in NYC means drinking a beer with Gary Shteyngart getting an MFA in NYC is like being a barmaid at Oktoberfest. Joan Didion once wrote that when she grew out of girlhood the world was no longer full of eyes. Graduating out of an MFA program can feel like passing beneath a statue and realizing her gaze was never fixed on you but on the horizon.
Following a trail of breadcrumbs from my friend Liza Monroy’s website, I found William Bowers’ really exceptional essay “All We Read is Freaks” at The Rumpus. Bowers writes about his childhood love of Dickinson and the heartbreak of grasping for poetry and finding it insufficient to inspire his community college students in Gainesville, Florida. At the same time, Emily Dickinson’s poetry gives the author a framework, more permeable and yet with the same tensile strength as the religious admonitions that surrounded him in childhood and as a teacher with his own sad Southern Gothic.* Mural of Emily Dickinson on a wall at West Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts where the poet is buried *Apologies to Bowers, who comments on his distaste for the overuse–and misuse–of…
“Three Feet Tall, Unemployed, Flat-Broke and Illiterate: Mary Karr in the Paris Review”
Just posted in it’s entirety at Paste Magazine: Profile of debut novelist Carolina De Robertis’ stunning novel, set in Uruguay and beyond. Carolina was a wonderful interview, we discussed, among other things, the ghettoization of Latin American authors into the “magic realism” genre. Invisible Mountain was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the ten best books of 2009 by O Magazine.
New post at The Faster Times on the Atlantic Monthly’s March issue.
Tagged: Atlantic Monthly, Magazine Roundup, The Faster Times
Film Comment Selects at Lincoln Center screened a great new film by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. I reviewed the film for my In Sight column at BOMBlog.
The New York Public Library is my Mecca and Medina, it’s the most gorgeous temple to literature I’ve ever seen (unless you count Nature, though would literature be a temple then to nature…hmm). So to be reading there is a huge, huge thrill. The reading series is called “Periodically Speaking” and it’s hosted by CLMP (Council for Literary Magazines and Presses) who asks editors from literary magazines to introduce emerging writers from their pages. I’ll be reading from a piece upcoming in Tin House (Fall Issue, on the shelves Oct 1st). Come!
I recently profiled emerging writer Carolina De Robertis for Paste Magazine’s new issue (October, ’09). Carolina was an amazing interview, talking about wide-ranging topics from the bastardization of the term “magic realism” to the intersections between life and storytelling. I can’t recommend her debut novel Invisible Mountain highly enough. She recently graced NY with her presence, reading from the novel at the Brooklyn Book Festival.
New article about filmmaker Jem Cohen on my In Sight column at the BOMBlog.
