Essay John Weir Adapted from a photo by Jake weirick on Unsplash Like a dead pop star, Susan Sontag left behind a lot of fans who claim they knew her. After the release last September of Benjamin Moser’s new biography, Susan Sontag: Her Life and Work, they were all over the internet, sharing stories. Writers, of course. Especially queer writers. Does every queer writer who lived in New York City and published a book sometime between 1960 and 2000 have a Sontag story? I do! Here’s mine: Eighteen years ago, shortly after she won the National Book Award for her fourth novel, In America, some of which she had been accused of plagiarizing, and a few months before she published, in the New Yorker, maybe the only response to the 9/11 attacks, in their immediate aftermath, that was worth considering, she was invited, along with John Updike and Norman Mailer, to read at Queens College CUNY, where I teach creative writing. Surely the most impressive trio of literary bigwigs of a certain era ever to read together in Flushing. Three idols. I had long regarded their work with awe and envy. In my early twenties, in the 1980s, in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, hot and airless in summer, frigid in winter, I read—eagerly, jealously—everything they wrote. I was an aspiring writer, and they were my workshop instructors and problematic literary parents. Updike’s Couples taught me how to do a party scene. Mailer’s An American... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2020-01-07 22:09:56 UTC ]
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Columns by Ira Berkow go beyond the statistics to describe the essence of the game and those who have played it. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2022-07-15 12:00:28 UTC ]
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Rafael Agustin dishes about "Illegally Yours," his candid new memoir about a childhood without documents, and the TV pilot that never made it. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2022-07-07 13:00:42 UTC ]
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Morgan Talty’s The Night of the Living Rez is a searching and honest collection of short stories following a young Penobscot character named David and his coming of age on the rez, where community, family, and tradition are as fraught with colonial entanglement as they are forces for healing. ... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-07-06 11:00:00 UTC ]
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What are the best short stories about the theme of motherhood? And who are the best mother characters in short fiction? Below, we select and introduce some of the most famous, and most widely studied, short stories which deal with the subject of mothers and motherhood. These stories range from […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-07-01 14:00:56 UTC ]
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Libraries from California to North Carolina to Utah to New York have seen their Pride displays challenged or removed this month. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2022-06-30 10:41:00 UTC ]
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These queer short story collections span a wide range of genres form contemporary and historical fiction to sci-fi and fabulism. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2022-06-28 10:33:00 UTC ]
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From ghost stories to chilling horror tales to short retellings of classic fairy tales, the short story form has often been at home to the supernatural. Below, we select and introduce ten of the very best short stories which feature some supernatural element: a ghost, a magical talisman, a... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-06-24 14:00:29 UTC ]
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What are some of the best, and best-known, short stories that feature animals? Many classic stories feature other species in prominent roles, whether it’s talking cats, dogs telling us their life stories, or primates giving academic reports at a conference (yes, really). Below, we select and... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-06-17 14:00:51 UTC ]
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As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr probably never said, ‘predictions are hard, especially about the future.’ And although the job of authors of science fiction and speculative fiction isn’t to make accurate predictions about what our future lives might look like, but to entertain us by tapping... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-06-15 14:00:18 UTC ]
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Genuinely classic and canonical short stories with twist endings are hard to find. For the ‘twist’ to be a true surprise, it needs to appear to come out of nowhere while also being completely credible, so we as readers don’t feel cheated. It should also be a twist in the […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-06-10 14:00:35 UTC ]
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Linda Villarosa offers data as well as vivid anecdotes to illustrate the biases that patients of color face. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2022-06-10 12:00:45 UTC ]
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The movement intends to "empty libraries of LGBTQ content aimed at kids" by checking out and hiding all LGBTQ books on library displays. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2022-06-06 13:35:02 UTC ]
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In 2014, book critic Dwight Garner published a lament in the New York Times for a seemingly forgotten literary masterpiece, the oral history All God’s Dangers. Published in 1974 by then-Harvard doctoral candidate Theodore Rosengarten, the autobiography was narrated by Nate Shaw, an illiterate... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-06-06 08:51:52 UTC ]
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Fathers are often domineering or formative presences in fiction, and the following classic short stories all focus on the important influence of fathers on their children, even though, in at least one of the stories listed here, the father is absent from the story itself. These stories are among... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-06-03 14:00:08 UTC ]
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Family plays an important part in much fiction, of course, but sometimes the short story form has offered us an insight into family life that the longer novel does not. Because it can only provide us with a few snapshots, or a handful of moments, perhaps even just one episode […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-05-27 14:00:35 UTC ]
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‘The Snake’ is a short story by the American author John Steinbeck (1902-68), published in The Monterey Beacon in 1935 before being included in Steinbeck’s collection The Long Valley in 1938. The story tells of a young scientist who is at work experimenting with animals in his laboratory when he […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-05-26 14:00:50 UTC ]
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An 18-year-old student and a 98-year-old survivor teamed up to write “Lily’s Promise,” a best-selling memoir of Auschwitz and its aftermath. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2022-05-26 09:00:09 UTC ]
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A selection of books published this week; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2022-05-20 20:53:25 UTC ]
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Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a prolific novelist, short-story writer, and poet, who is perhaps best-known for classic children’s books like The Jungle Book and for poems like ‘If—’. But Kipling’s short stories for adults often get overlooked – a fact which is perhaps hardly surprising given... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-05-18 14:00:38 UTC ]
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In her memoir “Mean Baby,” the “Hellboy” actress opens up about her childhood and career and how she has coped with a variety of challenges Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2022-05-15 04:00:00 UTC ]
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