Category: Literature

  • Knockemstiff

    I just read Donald Ray Pollock’s debut story collection, Knockemstiff, which takes place in rural southern Ohio, in a town of the same name as the book. The stories are dark, deadly, and mythic depictions of something more than what you’d even call small town Ohio, a sort of gothic revision of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,…

  • Highbrow/Lowbrow

    If you haven’t read the article by Charles McGrath in the Times about highbrow/lowbrow distinctions in literature in the wake of the author in England who won a settlement in court by claiming that fumes from a shoe factory near her house caused her to write a thriller, which she claimed was a fall from…

  • Finding voices

    One of the things I love about the internet is being able to access so many interviews, speeches, debates, lectures and articles by so many authors, artists and thinkers around the globe.  When I recall life pre-internet, and how these items seemed further away and took more time and energy to seek out and find…

  • More Happy Things

    First: The finished copy of the book came today! Me acting like a grade school boy with his spelling bee award or something to that effect. And second: The Endicott Studio’s Journal of the Mythic Arts has its Summer YA issue live now. They’ve got fantastic stories, poetry, art and essays over there, so go…

  • I want my 21st Century Gothic. Do you?

    I recently read a review of the latest Realms of Fantasy at Tangent, and this was the review for my story: “Little Miss Apocalypse” by Christopher Barzak is a bit of a downer, but I can’t say the author didn’t warn us. It’s about enduring love, but a rather sick form of it, in my…

  • Revision

    Thanks to the very sweet Vonday McIntyre and Diane Turnshek, the mini-essay I wrote for the Nebulas on “The Language of Moths” has been replaced with the final version I’d settled on after revision help from Jackie M, who has the most incredible pink hair (saw her at Wiscon this weekend and had a good chat by the elevators about…

  • Interfictions give-away

    Small Beer Press is giving away some free copies of the new Interfictions anthology, but the free copies are limited, and here’s the way you get one for free:  reply fast to his post on the Small Beer “Not a Journal” website, review the book online or in print, interview one of the authors in…

  • From a previous notebook

    I’ve had several “journals” online and one that was short-lived but managed to capture in the two months I used it an interesting turning point in my life (at least looking back on it retrospectively) was the one I kept at Journalscape.  On a whim, looking back through that small pile of posts tonight, I came…

  • The Stage is back, see you there…

    The STAGE. Come to it

  • Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84

    I’ll miss having him around.  His books have meant a lot to me at various times in my life.  He can make me laugh at suffering more easily than any other author I’ve read. New York Times article Really excellent audio interview at Bookworm