Ru Freeman

Eight years after Ted Conover's book, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (Random House, 2000), came out, a Pew report found that 1 in 100 Americans were behind bars. Although the overall prison population has declined in each of the last three years under...

Temperatures warmed and the Occupiers went back to the streets in April, which also happened to be National Poetry Month. The month usually dawns with the usual list of celebrations by the usual list of suspects: events scheduled by the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American...

May 8th was a big day for Tayari Jones. That is when her third novel, Silver Sparrow (Algonquin, 2011), which deals with the two families created by a single man, came out in paperback. To kick-off the whirlwind of reading and speaking engagements, her publisher has...

We won't know the winner of this year's Man Asian Literary Prize, until Thursday evening, March 15th, when the name will be announced at a ceremony in Hong Kong, so here's the next best thing: an interview with one of the judges, Pulitzer Prize-nominated fiction writer,

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Annual Conference in any year is an unwieldy, slippery beast that grows tentacles and Gorgon heads before ones eyes. You arrive intending to do X, Y and Z and you end up discovering an alphabet in Chinese characters. You dress...

The standard MO for new writers is to generate a collection of short stories before walking off into the sunset to produce the follow-up novel. The shelf-life of these "career-starter" works is usually brief; the short-fiction, unless resuscitated by other writers in workshops, dies its natural death only to be...

As a rule, poets have neither agents nor big contracts. Their art is seldom put to the test that most writers of fiction endure: will it sell? Untethered by such considerations, it seems, they are free to be true to their particular aesthetic, focussing on writing good poetry rather than...

Mamilla cemetery, located just inside West Jerusalem, contains the remains of several prominent Islamic leaders, including those who fought alongside Saladin, who retook Jerusalem from the Crusaders. It is visited also by the descendants of the less illustrious, like Mohammed al-Dejani, whose great-grandfather is buried there. The Israeli...

We can all recite famous first lines. "Call me Ismael" (Melville, Moby-Dick), "A screaming comes across the sky." (Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow), "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins," (Nabokov, Lolita), "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,"...

Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake recently told the Indian Express that the meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Chief Minister for Tamil Nadu, Jayalalitha, occurred "in the context of this recent film, the Channel 4 documentary that's...

As the parent of three avid readers, I agree with Meghan Cox Gurdon's point that what is considered "banning" in the book trade is known in the parenting world as doing our job. In a piece in the Wall Street Journal this week, she writes:

It is...

When the doors bang shut behind you, in that way that old, wooden doors do, and the odor of morning nourishments, the eggs, the blueberries, the toast, rush forward to greet you, the writer who has just come in, has but one thought, a thought only tangentially related to the...

On April secnd, Sri Lanka takes on India in the final for the ICC World Cup. What better day on which to think about Shehan Karunatilaka's debut novel, Chinaman, which has been described as being "ambitious, playful and strikingly original, [a novel] about cricket...

By now you have booked your hotel and are elated by (or resigned to) the prospect of sharing a room with a writer you hardly know. You have paid your registration fee and you imagine that only one thing stands between you and the excitement (or fatigue) of AWP: a...

There was a debate raging on Facebook recently about the beginning of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an effort begun by a couple of friends and that has grown into, at last count, 120,000 individuals across the nation -- perhaps further -- churning out a 50,000 word novel in...

I heard about being included on the long list for this prize via a google alert that also had one alerting me to the fact that someone was flogging a copy of my novel on eBay. I guess technology has a way of keeping us all humble. In going...

I have just finished reading the last issue of the New Yorker with its pages full of the words of fiction writers (New Yorker, June 14th, 2010). Yes, this would be the much-debated 20 Under 40 Summer Fiction issue. As is the case with this...

Is it ever possible to go against the grain, particularly in an industry so thick with sexism that it is a veritable live model of exploitation where the masses who write, read and purchase books (women) support the few who judge, award and critique them (men)? Apparently, not only is...

To reach the reading space at the independent book store owned by Mary Cotton and Jaime Clarke, Newtonville Books in Boston, a writer has to pass through a slim corridor accessed by a few steps, and the process puts one in mind of the entire work of writing...

A lot has been written about Facebook's various attempts to mis/manage our online data. In general, I am of the opinion that we can forgo a few minutes of updating our status about, say, whether or not we've brushed our teeth or exactly how many papers we have left to...