Category: literary life

Here’s an interview with Monica Ali. I think the online writing group she’s talking about is Zoetrope.

In the New York Times Books in Brief.

Hari Kunzru explains why he turned down the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. Some of the judges were angry that the prize was used as a “political platform” but I think it’s foolish to expect writers to keep to polite subjects rather than what makes them tick.

Jimmy Carter’s novel, the Hornet’s Nest, includes a sex scene. And that fact alone warrants this article.

The Seattle Times has a brief review of this year’s O. Henry and Best American Short Stories. The reviewer seemed to like O. Henry (I thought the selections were uneven.) She also complained that BASS has a story by Mary Yukari Waters and says that “both this story and last year’s selection were set in Japan, with similar themes.” That’s like complaining that a Flannery O’Connor story is set in the South.

Michiko doesn’t like the new collection of John Updike’s early stories very much.

Arguing that “a selection, surely, is best left to others, when the author is no longer alive to obstruct the process,” Mr. Updike has included virtually every short piece of fiction he wrote between 1953 and 1975 within these pages (presumably the later ones will be gathered in a gargantuan volume yet to come), and the resulting 800-plus-page book is a decidedly spotty production, filled indiscriminately with classic gems that attest to the author’s determination “to give the mundane its beautiful due”; clumsy apprentice works with creaky, contrived endings; and later ham-handed experimental efforts to expand Mr. Updike’s fictional terrain.