It’s not polite to eavesdrop. But how many gold nuggets of dialogue have you overheard in your life? I always feel at a loss when I don’t have a notebook and pen in my purse to jot down ideas and strangers’ intriguing utterances. Recently, in a restaurant in Seattle, I heard a man say to…
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Until thirteen unwelcome dwarves and a wizard came and took him away on an equally unwelcome adventure.
Sonnet XVIII, William Shakespeare
Okay Writers. Confession: my last couple months disappeared in helpless Waiting: to hear from an interested publisher, to hear about grant funds, to get word on research, jobs, schools, where the hell I’ll be living in six months… It’s excruciating. And I’m not alone. Thousands of you are sending out resumes, submitting manuscripts, obsessively checking gradcafe.com, hearing…
People of the Book is an interview series gathering those engaged with books, broadly defined. As participants answer the same set of questions, their varied responses chart an informal ethnography of the book, highlighting its rich history as a mutable medium and anticipating its potential future. This week brings the conversation to Mara Mills, a professor…
Under review: 9.58: Being the World’s Fastest Man, by Usain Bolt with Shaun Custis (2010, HarperSport, 287 pages) As the Sochi Winter Olympic Games lurch to a close, it’s instructional to remember that, for Summer Olympians, the past two weeks were exactly like every other two weeks in an uninterrupted four years of solitary, quasi-monastic…
Last week I came into the office where I work, sat down, ate an enormous bagel, and laughed so hard that the guy sitting behind me wheeled his chair over to my desk and said, “What’s so funny?” I pointed at my screen where April Wilder’s story “Creative Writing Instructor Evaluation Form” was up on…
You’re trying to write a novel. Sometimes, it’s exhilarating: characters wake you in the night, yammering, springing into action. Sometimes, it’s excruciating: you stare into blankness, and finally, when the words arrive, they reek of your incompetence. It’s taking forever, this novel of yours. It’s ugly. It’s full of holes. Is this normal? Writing…
As an agent, it’s my job to figure out what’s going to be popular among readers. I’m looking not only for books that editors will like now, but that the rest of the world will like eighteen months from now. Luckily, I only have to figure this out for books, and not the rest of…
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