A while back, Jeff Bryant asked me who I consider to be an underrated writer for a list he was compiling over at Syntax of Things. Alas, I am slow as molasses, so I sent my response in too late, but here’s what I would’ve said, had I been more timely:
Not exactly underrated, here [...]
Allen Barra, a fellow Alabamian, has an excellent piece in Salon called “Reading Lolita in Alabama,” in which he credits Nabokov with turning him on to literature and helping him to form his ideas about what good literature is: i.e., a work of artifice, not of ideology. He disagrees with Azar Nafisi’s (Reading Lolita in [...]
Over at Galleycat yesterday, I confessed my New Year’s Resolution: “to read an honest-to-goodness potboiler, complete with smokin-guns and dark-cloaked villains.” I’ve sort of avoided mysteries and thrillers for my entire adult reading life. The last mystery I remember reading is from the Nancy Drew series! So, along comes a book that might give me [...]
Fa la la, the holidays were scrumptious because a) Kevin took Thursday and Friday off work, b) our friend Pio was in town and we got to see him in action, filming the Super Bowl commercial for Coke, c) we engaged in the Phelan family tradition of going out for pizza on Christmas Eve, then [...]
I read Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld, over the holidays. This book was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2005, alongside Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. While I found the book enjoyable, my impression is that [...]
Allow me to take a momentary break from my holiday break to mention Ismael Kadare’s story in the New Yorker this week.
If Albanian fiction is your thing, you might also enjoy the work of one unsung yet magnificent Jiri Kajane, whose work I’ve had the pleasure of publishing, in translation, of course, in Fiction Attic. [...]
There are presents to wrap and cakes to bake, not to mention I’ve come down with the flu, so I’ll be taking a break for a few days. Happy holidays!
University of Louisville. Axton Fellowship in Creative Writing. Writers who have received their terminal degree within the last five years in Creative Writing are invited to apply for an Axton Fellowship in Creative Writing. The purpose of these fellowships is to provide recent graduates with time to further their own work, to associate them [...]
Over at The Millions today, Max gives me the chance to sing the praises of the best books I read this year. Top o’ the Heap: The Death of a Beekeeper, which I’ve surely mentioned in these pages before. You may also find a couple of surprises on the list, as Max allowed us to [...]
Don George, weekly travel columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and editor of the Lonely Planet humor anthology By the Seat of My Pants, will be at Book Passage in Corte Madera tonight at 7:00. I’ll be joining him to talk about my essay, “Blackout in Ushauia,” which involves an electrical outage at the Southern [...]
