The much-acclaimed Irish author of Small Things Like These on her quietly devastating new story and why George Saunders wouldn’t read it aloud for a podcastClaire Keegan’s five books to date run to just 700 pages and some 140,000 words. “I love to see prose being written economically,” she tells me. “Elegance is saying just enough. And I do believe that the reader completes the story.” Revered by critics and prize judges for the miraculous density of her short fiction ever since her 1999 debut, Antarctica, she became an international bestseller two years ago with her first novel, Small Things Like These, about an Irish coal merchant whose eyes are opened one Christmas to the horror behind the walls of his biggest customer, a laundry run by nuns. “I think the book was taking off before it was shortlisted for the Booker prize,” Keegan, speaking from her home on the Wexford coast after technology thwarts our planned video call. “A lot of the sales went through word of mouth. A lot of people bought the book for other people for Christmas. People read it and bought it for other people in the new year. Now it’s on the school syllabus here.”The novel, which won last year’s Orwell prize for political fiction, takes its epigraph from the 1916 proclamation of the Irish republic, pledging “equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens”, a damning prelude to a book about systematised misogyny. Keegan’s new book, So Late in the Day, a 64-page story published as a standalone... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-09-02 17:00:10 UTC ]
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First Story and the University of Cambridge are the new partners of the BBC’s short story awards, replacing BookTrust, in a three-year collaboration starting in 2018. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2017-09-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Cal Newport’s recent book champions the virtues of dedicated time for uninterrupted thinking. But can the perpetually overtasked modern worker make “deep work” a reality? Continue reading at Knowledge@Wharton
[ Knowledge@Wharton | 2016-06-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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New Writing North, working with Channel 4, Northumbria University and Lime Pictures, is offering aspiring TV writers from the North of England 12-month placements in either soap or children’s drama production companies. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2016-01-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Earning a living as a writer is as likely as winning the lottery. Instead of writing books and persuading others to buy them, find out what people want to write, then do it for themPhilip Pullman: professional writers set to become ‘an endangered species’ due to low wagesI left school with a... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2016-01-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Welcome to NaNoWriMo! MG Leonard (who wrote her first book Beetle Boy in six months, one hour a day) has tips on how to do it. And it starts with writing EVERY SINGLE DAY NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and takes place every November. It’s for anyone thinking about writing a... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-11-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Mainstream mags may be shutting down, but specialist publishing has never been in healthier shape. So which magazines should you be subscribing to?While mainstream magazines are seeing sales fall, and long-standing titles such as Loaded are printing their final issues, the world of niche,... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-04-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Oftentimes, a reader asks what it’s like to publish a memoir with family members in it. How do you seek permission? What do you do when someone in your family protests your storytelling? Do you write it anyway? In this transmission, the radio delivers the questions as something else: Where is... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2024-05-06 08:53:35 UTC ]
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The answer lies at the heart of theoretical physics. Note: The following article contains spoilers about the Netflix series 3 Body Problem.I first encountered the three-body problem 60 years ago, in a short story called “Placet is a Crazy Place” by American science fiction writer Frederic Brown. Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2024-04-27 12:00:00 UTC ]
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The novelist traded a finance career to pursue fiction. It just may have saved his life. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2024-04-26 04:00:00 UTC ]
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“We are a literary city”: Will Evans started saying it in 2013, when he started the publisher Deep Vellum. Alongside the bookstore Wild Detectives and others, they’ve put Dallas on the literary map. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2024-04-25 09:05:49 UTC ]
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Seminary Co-op booksellers and friends have held a number of conversations with legendary bookseller Paul Yamazaki throughout the past two years, in the intoxicating stacks of City Lights, perambulating the streets of San Francisco, and over whiskey tumblers deep into the night. With Paul we’ve... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2024-04-19 08:59:44 UTC ]
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It’s 2015. My partner and I are in Moab, Utah, for the summer, far from our home of Philadelphia. He is doing research for his dissertation. I am struggling to rewrite a novel that my editor says—and I agree—isn’t working. The desert landscape in southwest Utah is magnificent and to us wholly... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2024-04-19 08:53:24 UTC ]
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PEN America has faced an enormous amount of criticism from the literary world for, among other things, failing to call Israel’s six-month assault on Gaza a genocide, and is now facing a wave of withdrawals from two of its signature events, the literary awards and the World Voices Festival. In... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2024-04-18 14:26:32 UTC ]
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I have always loved the versatility of the short story, how it can so easily take on the forms of other things. There are playlist short stories, recipe short stories, diary and epistolary-style short stories. There are flash fiction stories, short short stories, and long short stories that... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2024-04-15 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Akwaeke Emezi, Rivers Solomon, and others offer realistic, fantastical, and experimental looks at LGBTQ life. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2024-04-12 04:00:00 UTC ]
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First US Anthology Celebrates Literary Translators’ Work from Nineteen Languages, by The Editors of WLT News and Events [email protected] Mon, 04/08/2024 - 14:33 The first US anthology celebrating the breadth of literary translators’ work debuts... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2024-04-08 19:33:31 UTC ]
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I first met Crystal Hana Kim at Women and Children First Bookstore in Chicago in 2017 for a book event, just after she just won the 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She greeted me with warm enthusiasm and we spoke about Korean history. Her debut novel, If You Leave... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2024-04-02 08:54:17 UTC ]
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Short stories can do things novels cannot because they’re short. They’re limber and can dart in and out of close-fitting places. They can be weird and daring in ways that novels cannot always sustain. Joy Williams writes in, “8 Essential Attributes of the Short Story (and one way it differs from... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2024-03-28 11:00:00 UTC ]
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'The Hive and the Honey' is the winner of this year's Story Prize, which was presented at a ceremony March 26 at the Lotos Club in New York City. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2024-03-27 04:00:00 UTC ]
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