If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
My Little Publishing Company plans to single-handedly bring back the prestige of literary prizes.
This summer, I found myself re-reading Alice Walker's The Color Purple, a book that is both wonderful and awful. After finishing, I asked myself, "Why do some books by great authors (or parts of books by great authors) work so well, while others fail?"
Gender distinctions in literature are arbitrary and often ass-backwards. Can women, for example, write "men's fiction"? Why not?
An incredible number of literary heavyweights have been insulted with spots on the Bad Sex shortlist over the past 19 years. Which begs the question: Has sufficient attention been paid to the art of writing sex scenes?
The truth about American poetry is that it is in very bad shape. The professional poetry establishment has taken care to mark serious criticism comin...
Last night's resplendent Academy Awards ceremony put me in mind of a less opulent affair: the Associated Writing Program's annual conference earlier this month in Washington, D.C.
I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.
The novel begins to close itself to the writer who built it out of her private concerns and instincts. She who knows its measurements exactly, who invented its inner workings, begins little by little to forget how it was made.
We live in an age where many authors ponder their own experience over and over in styles that can be impenetrable, but Vargas Llosa looks at the world and writes about it with such wisdom that he doesn't fear being understood.
I never thought I'd see the day when "To Kill A Mockingbird" -- a novel that has inspired readers for half a century -- would be derided as a book about "the limitations of liberalism."
Mom isn't the little old lady from Pasadena. And you're not a kid anymore. So stun her on Mother's Day --- give her books that don't talk down to her. Like these ten...
On Monday, the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded Versed by Rae Armantrout their 2010 award for poetry.
Norman Mailer died in 2007. But his life and his death have been transfigured into a writers' colony that searches the English-speaking world for the next generation of writers.
Ultimately, the presence of the gods in The Infinities draws our attention, not to the heavens, but to the characters' spaces within, and the inner infinite in us all.
In one stroke, Pulitzer simultaneously elevated the common man and took his spare change. The World was good and readers flocked.
Nobody knows what the future holds for print, but Harris has given us a book that will inspire journalists to pursue public service journalism in whatever format it takes.
-
AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOEDby Khaled Hosseini
AMERICANAHby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A GUIDE TO BEING BORNby Ramona Ausubel
THE GOLEM AND THE JINNIby Helene Wecker
Published on April 23rd, 2013
