February 7, 2008 – 11:53 am
As I mentioned last week, I am teaching a class in short-story writing this semester entitled Once & Again: A Workshop in Creative Revision. This week’s class was relatively uneventful, from an outside perspective. If you had shown up in the middle of it, you would have seen five students (and one dashingly handsome teacher) [...]
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, is an experimental novel about the last human being on the planet. It is devoid of a story in any traditional sense, being more a fictional woman’s meditation on the intertextuality of culture, where Helen and Paris and Vincent Van Gogh have just as much—if not more—reality than the woman’s [...]
[This is the result of a writer's prompt given during my residency at Goddard. It's a revised first draft (not quite second draft). I may rework it later into a short-story.]
A hospital delivery room. One set of swinging doors with windows in them at eye level.
In the hot seat, CLARICE, a one-armed white girl, early [...]
All you interface fanboys gotta check out Daring Fireball’s An Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme Shows Up for the WWDC Preview Build of Mac OS X Leopard.
Nevil Shute’s novel, On The Beach, begins in Australia on December 27, 196—, which is already sometime after nuclear war has eradicated humanity from the Northern Hemisphere. The novel ends the following year, sometime in late August or early September, when the fallout finally arrives on the southernmost-inhabited continent and kills off the only human [...]
March 25, 2007 – 01:19 pm
From Call Me, Ishmael: “Lately I’ve come around…to the realization that cellphones, while they might have their uses in what we are pleased to call “real life†(though I’m still to come to a final verdict on that), are nothing but an albatross around the neck of any writer who wants to tell a story. [...]
January 10, 2007 – 12:05 pm
[Here's the result of another writing prompt given out by my advisor -- oh I didn't tell you all who he is: His name's Kyle Bass, and I heard his stuff yesterday, and my god, is he a damn fine writer! I can't tell you how lucky I am to be working with the guy. [...]
January 9, 2007 – 12:32 pm
[On Sunday, my advisor at the residency for my M.F.A in Creative Writing program gave us a writing exercise to be turned it this morning. We had to write a story where three characters (one has to be a child, another an alien in the E.T. sense, and the last a person suffering from severe [...]
November 17, 2006 – 01:36 pm
From Representative Fictions, a review of a new two-volume treatise entitled, The Novel (which, itself, is based on an original, five-volume series published in Italian): “Rather than painstakingly interpreting the complexly integrated elements of a single text, distant reading conducts quantitative analyses of particular elements across hundreds of texts at once–the geographical location in which [...]
The NY Times reveals what “a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages” have chosen as the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years.
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