When Mark Budman of Vestal Review asked me for a short-short, I was happy to comply. The magazine publishes stories of 500 words or fewer. My story collection contains several very short stories, but none this short. It turned out to be quite a challenge whittling a story down to so few words, but it was nice to take a break from the novel to write something truly brief. Here’s In Flight, inspired in part by an experience my husband had on a plane some 12 years ago, before I’d ever met him. If you have a knack for...
Litmags
Rick Bass on shyness
Rick Bass has a wonderful nonfiction piece in the new issue of Narrative Magazine about what it means to be shy: When you’re shy, and a writer, it’s not the same as being just, say, shy and a mechanic, or shy and a typist: I mean, people know you’re watching them. It’s like you’ve lost all your privacy—you can’t even stand in a crowd and be quiet and watch things, because they know what you’re up to—and then if that crowd happens to be other writers, well, that’s the worst, it’s just the absolute worst. You may have to...
mama smarts
Andi Buchanan, managing editor of the hip online mama mag Literary Mama, has a new book out, Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, which she co-edited with Amy Hudock (Seal Press, Jan. 2006). This compendium of work gleaned from the magazine features well-known and beginning writers tackling motherhood from many different angles, from adoption and miscarriage to gender identity and generational rifts. Read the introduction here. I’m particularly pleased to blog about this offering from a member of the Girlfriends’ Cyber Circuit, as I’m a big fan of Literary Mama. Disclaimer: they recently ran a story of mine,...
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. In fact, Kajane’s story, “Okay, A Cake Then!” was the first one I ever published on Fiction Attic. It was translated by Kevin Phelan (disclaimer: he’s my husband!) and Bill U’Ren (you might have seen him playing drums with Madison Smartt Bell’s band)...
pantalaine
The new McSweeney’s came in the mail today, a bundle of odds and ends all held together with plastic wrap, bearing the label: McSweeney’s 17: Made to Look Like It Came in Your Mailbox. The topmost piece of “mail” in the package is a full-color advert called Pantalaine, “Provisioners of America’s Finest Plural Clothing,” out of South Bend, Indiana. The featured product? A “unixex snap trainer,” featuring “shared center-leg construction” and the ability to break “in half for quick recombination with compatible Pantalaine snap trainers.” For the low, low price of twenty-nine bucks, who wouldn’t want a pair? The...
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
Stop dreaming, start writing!
