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Mar30
Where Are the Best Book Reviews?

The Beautiful Things That Heaven BearsWho are your favorite book reviewers? 

While reading Tom Bissell's thoughtful, repeated review of the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close yesterday, I remembered how rare it is to find a review like that--an essay that helps you think about literature and writing, rather than telling you "thumbs up, thumbs down" like a movie reviewer spewing 30-second reviews on a bad television program.

I dig book reviews at The Washington Post, The Believer, and The Millions, just to mention a few favorites off the top of my head. Now it's your turn. Leave links and names to your favorite reviewers in the comments section, and I'll publish a post collecting our answers.

To get you thinking, here's a Washington Post review from Christopher Byrd, one of the more thoughtful young reviewers I've met over the last few years. Here, he looks at a novel about an Ethiopian immigrant. Check it out...

"This lends an urgency to their ruminations that believably cleanses their conversation of small talk. In other words, the big ideas of Stephanos and his two African friends about racial politics in America, the necessary accouterments for success, and why colonels make for better dictators than generals don't come off as stilted but as natural byproducts of their exiled condition."

 

Mar29
Nice People Finishing First
Nice will get you laughed at in the blogosphere. Nice won't score you a tell-all book deal. Nice gets a bad rap.Nevertheless, I dig nice writers. People like Bruno Schulz or Susan Henderson get passed over because they have such... Continue Reading
The Future of Digital Publishing as Seen through a Grainy, Homemade Video
I'm showing you a video today. It's nothing fancy (but we're working on making it better), but it is a dialogue between two powerful media executives about the future of digital content. I shot this video at a panel discussion... Continue Reading
Mar28
How To Make Your Story Really Exist
Oh my goodness. I've been waiting a whole year for this to happen, and it happened.The world of Alternate-Reality Games--the Internet-spawned genre where readers get to play out a fictional story in the real world--has finally found a private detective... Continue Reading
Diversify Your Reading!
What do comic books and fantasy stories have to teach fledgling "regular" or "serious" writers? Everything!For every "serious" book I read, I also read a private detective novel, a science fiction story, or a comic book. These genres have influenced... Continue Reading
Mar27
A Rock & Roll Interlude
Over the weekend (entirely by accident) I met director Paul Rachman, the man behind the documentary American Hardcore as well as scores of music videos that my buddies and I would watch in high school. He worked with some... Continue Reading
Mar26
How To Avoid the Five Year Single Submission Plan?
How many people can read your stories at once? Our favorite writing market guru, Erika Dreifus, just stirred up a discussion about simultaneous submissions to creative writing journals and magazines. The process varies among different publications, but the debate has... Continue Reading
Mar23
"The Waterfall of Reality"
It's time to take a bath.Our favorite anonymous agent blogger, Miss Snark, has just released some crazy statistics. She recorded how many submissions she receives every month, and compared those numbers against the few, talented folks who actually win... Continue Reading
Mar22
How To Deal With Rejection
How do you deal with rejection? Our creative writing MFA guru Tom Kealey reminds us that 'tis the season for graduate school rejection and acceptance letters. While some writers are getting happy news form their favorite schools, it also means... Continue Reading
Mar21
How To Write on the Micro-Level
Everybody loves to argue about what will happen to newspapers in ten years. We have a much more pressing problem: what will become of the journalists and writers employed by newspapers?Ed Champion cheered me up last week, discussing that very... Continue Reading
Mar20
Defend Your Kids' Right To Creative Writing!
We spend all our time here thinking about our own generation of writers, but we are missing a crisis that threatens the next generation. The Examiner just ran a heartbreaking essay from a schoolteacher in Washington DC. According to Erica... Continue Reading
Mar19
How To Give A Better Reading
What makes a good reader? I attend about four storytelling events a month. Within thirty seconds of hearing somebody can read, I can tell if somebody is a good, great, or terrible out-loud storyteller. It's hard to explain this sixth sense,... Continue Reading
Mar16
Lit Blog Wars
Lit Blog wars are good for you. The literary journal n + 1 just stirred up a whole new round of lit blog wars in a recent essay called "The Blog Reflex." I still haven't picked up the issue at... Continue Reading
Mar15
How To Sell Real Books In Imaginary Places
Can you sell books in imaginary stores?The publishing industry gurus at GalleyCat just reported that Bantam Dell will start promoting books in the imaginary world of Second Life where hundreds of thousands of real-life people use digital representations of themselves,... Continue Reading
Mar14
Why Writers Need To Travel

Continue Reading
Mar13
Style Week
Over at LitPark, Susan Henderson is having a big online discussion about writing style. I'm still thinking about how to describe my own style, but everybody should jump into the debate.Just listen to recently published novelist Amy Wallen, resorting to... Continue Reading
Mar12
Home Sweet Home
Yesterday I was staring at five gigantic volcanoes. Today, I'm back at a desk... I'm back from Guatemala. I know you missed me. I'll be posting photos and other goodies over the next few weeks, but today I'll be a little... Continue Reading
Mar 9
"Take care of the people" : How To Build a Reading Community
“I decided to model my self in the fashion of a Black aristocrat.  Using a photograph of the well respected Duke Ellington I pressed and ironed and tilted my hat with our beloved community in mind.  Yet I did not... Continue Reading
Mar 8
"Write and write and write until your hands our tired" : How To Build a YouTube Writing Community
Today, our special guest is Livingroom Johnston, a novelist, street storyteller, painter, and fledgling YouTube artist. This week we have discussed his New York stories as well as his new novel. Today, you can meet him on YouTube... Welcome to my... Continue Reading
Mar 7
The Fine Art of Self Fiction
No matter what you think about Livingroom Johnston’s prose—from his new novel to his sprawling stories wrapped in miles of MySpace pages—you have to agree you’ve never seen anything quite like him.His stories blend beat poet imagery with boozy adventures,... Continue Reading
Mar 6
"You can read for hours for free in there" : How To Channel Your Life Experience into Writing
"Hundreds  of  people  garbed  in  the  latest consumer digest outfits moved equivocally  up and down the strip with overstuffed shopping bags, biting thin air on hidden cell phones.  Some were poised in between building entrances, jabbing at two way pagers.... Continue Reading
Mar 5
"I like to write in bars while listening to the people around me" : How To Write Better Dialogue
"[B]ehind the four and five thousand dollar full-sized windows stood Midwestern undergrad students in tight-fitted colorful seventies outfits for ten-fifty an  hour, with hopes of becoming famous artists, sculptors, musicians, world changing feminists, philosophers, metaphysical champions, scientists, lawyers, judges with... Continue Reading
Mar 2
Bibliodata: A Resource for the Writer in Everyone
Sponsored Review – Bibliodata   Like it or not, we are all writers now. We compose emails, write documents, jot down notes, creatively use shortened forms of words in instant messenger and chat rooms, and occasionally, almost accidentally, even... Continue Reading
Mar 1
Guatemala Otra Vez, Otra Vez
I've been waiting a whole year to tell you this: I'm going to Guatemala tomorrow. Don't worry, there's a special street storytelling version of Five Easy Questions being published while I'm gone, but I won't be answering emails for the... Continue Reading
See the World
I am less than 24-hours away from my first trip outside of the United States in four years. Why should I bring this up on a writing website? Because, for writers, a little bit of traveling goes a long way. When... Continue Reading

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