Clik here to view.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore Robin Sloan Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2012 288 pages $25.00 What: a book about books And: their simultaneous demise and triumph And, obviously: immortality...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Literary Boroughs #44: Ottawa, Canada
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Literary Boroughs #52: Toronto, Ontario
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Do Characters Dream of Left-Justified Sheep? (Part Two)
How can you avoid bad dream-writing? Part One of this post appeared on Monday. All right, let’s talk about the good things dreams can do for your writing process. Let’s have some nice dreams. Real-ize...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writing By Ear
The Sultan Forgives Scheherazade by Arthur Boyd Houghton (1836-1875). A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture by Margaret Atwood, during which, in response to a question about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Things We Find in Books
Whatever the reasons for Borders going out of business, it sure wasn’t for lack of sturdy, long-lasting bookmarks. Let me explain. Recently, I picked up my wife’s copy of Phillip Roth’s The Plot...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fictional Writer Master Class: The Bamboozlers
One of the perks of working in academia is ordering desk copies of books. While more often than not these things are tedious tomes that would put me to sleep, never mind my students, sometimes I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Literary Lines that Make a Mark
Recently I enjoyed a wondrous weekend in Austin during which I added a third tattoo to my collection. It so happens this is my second literary tattoo. The first, inked roughly a year ago, was a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Social Media and Literature
I seem a little less in love with literature because of social media. My apologies to the Ploughshares staff who have to Tweet about this post, but it’s true. For a few months I was an intern for an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
We Have Something to Say
Inside most classrooms lives a beast, many-eyed. If you’ve been a student in a classroom, especially in those early grades when a year lasts an eon, you’ve been part of this beast. You saw your...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Five Speculative Tales Still Relevant Today (And What They Can Teach Us)
1. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Seven-Word Summary: Women enslaved by tyrannical dicks with dicks. Excerpt: “Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn’t about who can own...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Round-Down: The Hogarth Series Will Reinvent Shakespeare’s Works As Novels
Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Gap of Time, released only one week ago, is the first book launched of a larger series, called The Hogarth Shakespeare. The series, from the revered Vintage Books, plans...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Round-Up: Chicago Public Library Giveaway, the 2016 PEN Pinter Prize, and...
From the Chicago Public Library’s children’s book giveaway to the passing of a central figure in Latin American writing, here’s some of last week’s most important literary news: Writer and activist...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crafting A Novelscape
In the words of my own personal goddess of literature, Joyce Carol Oates, one should “…never underestimate the power—benevolent, malevolent, profound and irresistible— of place.” These words make my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cultural Lifelines and Individual Artistry: An Interview with Robert Bringhurst
In 1999, Robert Bringhurst—polyglot translator, poet, and typographic authority—published A Story as Sharp as a Knife, a book about Haida myths and mythtellers. Bringhurst retranslates the work of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Launching
Today, my first book launches. It’s kind of a wonderful word, launch: such propulsive force in its sound. Such muscular, fearless leaping. To mark the occasion, I thought I’d take a look at launchings...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writ in Water: Reservation Round
In a space like this, when we talk about genre fiction, we are often talking about its limitations: its conventions, its shallowness, its easy accessibility, its (overly) familiar repetitions, its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Author Worship
The Canadian literary scene has been tumultuous lately, following Stephen Galloway’s dismissal from UBC following allegations of sexual assault. A number of prominent Canadian authors, including...
View ArticleClik here to view.
12 Books To Help You Survive 2017 And the Trump Era
Photo by Michael Vadon Since Nov. 8, like millions of others, I’ve been trying to come to grips with Hillary Clinton’s loss. Even writing that sentence was an undertaking. It is not so much that she...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Throwback Thursday: THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood has always asserted that her work isn’t science fiction: instead, she has always insisted that it be classified as speculative fiction. Defined by the author as the “things that really...
View Article
