New Short Fiction Series Flyer

More info on the Friday, October 9 event can be found here.

(Thank you, Alicia, for the wonderful quote!)

(Sorry for the temporary juxtaposition of two pictures of me. It's freaky, I know.)

Camus's American Journals, Part 4

"Small inn in the heart of the Adirondacks a thousand miles from everything. Entering my room, this strange feeling: during a business trip a man arrives, without any preconceived idea, at a remote inn in the wilderness. And there, the silence of nature, the simplicity of the room, the remoteness of everything, make him decide to stay there permanently, to cut all ties with what had been his life and to send no news of himself to anyone."

DimeStories 5th Anniversary CD

Recently got word that my story "Stalling" will be included in the DimeStories 5th anniversary CD.

Can't wait until the CD comes out? You can hear me reading the story here.

To Read Aloud or Not to Read Aloud?

"Think about cadence, about the natural rhythm of your words. Read your short short fiction aloud. It should flow effortlessly. It should sound pretty. If it doesn’t, ask yourself why."

That's from a nifty essay on writing very short fiction (VSF) by Roxane Gay.

About reading aloud: sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. There's no real method for me. Some stories feel like they need to be read out loud. (I used to read my stories to my cat, but he seemed a little bored.)

I haven't been doing it lately, but that's mostly because my writing has been minimal as of late.

Reading aloud can be very helpful for the reasons cited by Roxane. But on the other hand, I also worry about becoming too enamored with the way the words sound and somehow losing focus -- if that makes sense.

By the way, there are lots of other great essays at VIPs on vsf, a blog put together by Laura Ellen Scott.

White Noise Turns 25

Looks like the 25th anniversary edition of Don DeLillo's White Noise is going to be pretty cool.

The book includes accompanying artwork by Michael Cho. (At one point they were thinking of using Robert Crumb, but DeLillo didn't think he'd be the right fit.)

I wonder if the book will include an illustration of The Most Photographed Barn in America. I've always wondered what that looked like...

Borges Twitter Update

Periodically I like to see what JLB has been up to on Twitter.

Recent tweets include:

• "My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out."

• "Weekends away clear the head. Ready to dream up new monsters."

• "Baseball! Must re-read Robert Coover's book, The Universal Baseball Association, about a man who sets up a baseball league in his head."

• "To repeat something I once said in an interview: At my age, what can I do but plagiarize what I've already said, no?"

• "Very tired this morning. But I have been absent from this 140 character electronic box for too long."

• "An eternal problem: the original is unfaithful to the translation."

• "Drawing a self-portrait of my self-portrait."

Making Book Reviews New

Andrew Scott pointed this out on Facebook...

There's a great Ward Sutton graphic/comics review of Robert Boswell's recently published short story collection "The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards." (Great title, that.)

You can check out the review here.

Camus's American Journals, Part 3

"Two beings love each other. But they don't speak the same language. One of them speaks both languages, but the second language very imperfectly. It suffices for them to love each other. But the one who knows both languages dies. And his last words are in his native tongue which the other is unable to grasp. He searches, he searches..."

Trailer for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

It's the first movie based on a David Foster Wallace book. Will there be more? I know that years ago there was talk of someone turning Infinite Jest into a mini series kind of thing. Do they still make mini series?

Camus's American Journals, Part 2

"The afternoon with students. They don't feel the real problem; however, their nostalgia is evident. In this country where everything is done to prove that life isn't tragic, they feel something is missing. This great effort is pathetic, but one must reject the tragic after having looked at it, not before."

(I probably should have pointed out that these quotes come from a notebook Camus kept while on a lecture tour of the United States in 1946. He also kept a notebook while on a South American lecture tour in 1949; the poverty and suffering he saw there supposedly informed a lot of The Plague. Both of these notebooks were published as American Journals in 1987.)

New Story Approach from Colson Whitehead

Via Galleycat:

"Novelist Colson Whitehead's newest story isn't printed in any magazine or literary journal -- it's unfolding, as we speak, across three different websites."

Read more here.

Camus's American Journals, Part 1

"... I walk down Broadway, lost in the crowd and the enormous, illuminated billboards. Yes, there is an American tragic. It's what has been oppressing me since I arrived here, but I still don't know what it's made from."