Breaking the Sequence

Has this ever happened to you: You come across a passage or line in a book and think it brilliant, and are thrilled that you’re the first one to discover it, only to find that people have been talking and writing about that exact thing for years?
Much later than I should have, I read A [...]

Facebook: Gettin Literary Wit It

With all you’ve probably been hearing about Facebook lately, you’d think the entire world is being taken over by an evil empire, intent on sucking out our souls, wasting our time, and invading our privacy. But maybe something good has come out of everyone’s favorite social networking site.

The Facebook Review is the first literary magazine [...]

Send Us Submissions About Ethnicity and Race

The Ethnos issue is coming, and we’re still looking for submissions.
We’re looking for writing that navigates the complexities of ethnicity, race, and identity, and are accepting work in the genres of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, criticism, and cross genre, as well as original artwork. Experimental and political work are always welcome. See the site [...]

Bettye LaVette

Here’s a holiday recommendation for those with musically Fringey taste. I just got back from a trip to the West Coast that ended up being something of a vinyl binge, and picked up Bettye LaVette’s 2005 album I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise. LaVette is a soul singer who has somehow remained below the [...]

Feed the Hungry with Good Vocabulary

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I discovered a cool new site, via my aunt by way of my mother. It’s called FreeRice.
The site gives you a vocabulary quiz that is quite hard — my best level was a 46 — and featured words like “scintilla,” “veld,” and “decollate”. Word difficulty increases with every question you [...]

The First Page

So these days reading slush for Ploughshares and Redivider, as well as working for Fringe, I’m reading a lot of pour-water-over-my-head-to-wake-myself-back-up, clamp-jumper-cables-to-my-nipples-to-wake-me-back-up, boring-as-rust first pages. Lizzie talked about cover letters a gazillion posts ago; I thought I’d do a sequel. Here’s some thoughts on the first 300 words, because really, an editor can [...]

Lonely?

In the Prologue to Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about a dream where he goes to his own funeral and sees all his friends there, but when he wants to leave with them, he’s told he’s the only one who can’t go to the after-party. (That’s right, in dreams there are always after-parties.) [...]

November 23 is Buy Nothing Day!

Come all ye fair and tender shoppers
Be careful how you spend your dough
It’s like a puddle after a rainstorm
It first appears, then there’s no more
Tralala, it’s Buy Nothing Day! If you’re in the US or Canada, that is; in other countries it’s November 24. Buy Nothing Day was founded in 1992 to help us think [...]

Leaving the Country to Give Thanks

Five years ago I met my Canadian girlfriend, M. I’d like to tell you that we met reaching for Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language in our favorite independent bookstore, but we met in typical college fashion, in a gay bar across the river from campus. An athlete and later coach, M always [...]

The Amazon Kindle – Wave of the Future or Overpriced Tech-toy?

In this morning’s “Around the Water Cooler” segment of Good Morning America, I learned about the new Amazon Kindle. It’s concept isn’t new — it’s a wireless reading device that can hold up to 200 books, can display current newspapers and can even connect you to over 250 blogs. It’s a s thin as a [...]