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Ursula K. Le Guin updates her 1998 writing manual for the twenty-first century; Oxford Dictionaries adds one thousand new words to its website; Colombian garbage man provides books to children in impoverished areas; and other news.
"The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other." Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, whose latest book, On the Move: A Life, was published by Knopf in April, speaks about being a storyteller and what writing has meant to his life. Sacks passed away on August 30 at the age of eighty-two.
"I thought maybe I'd be a filmmaker but I wasn't any good at that either, so I just kept falling through the cracks to fiction." Claire Vaye Watkins, whose first novel, Gold Fame Citrus (Riverhead Books, 2015), is featured in Page One in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about how she arrived at writing fiction.
The turmoil behind Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman; on marriage, writing, and Clarice Lispector; the total weirdness of the book tour; and other news.
Ann Beattie, who is featured in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from her new book, The State We're In: Maine Stories (Scribner, 2015), and talks about her experiences in writing and reading fiction, and working with editors. For more Beattie, listen to the latest episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
What to read in the dog days of summer; libraries on bikes; a children's book that induces hypnosis; and other news.
Brandon Christopher talks about the experiences that inspired his memoir The Job Pirate: An Entertaining Tale of My Job-Hopping in America which was published by Bleeding Heart Publications in February. Bleeding Heart Publications is featured in Small Press Points in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In the game of telephone, a sentence is whispered down a line from person to person until the last person says the sentence out loud, which oftentimes turns out to be humorously different, and distorted by misunderstandings, from the original. Write a short story that opens with a dialogue between two characters talking on the phone. After the conversation is finished, imagine that one character has completely misheard or misinterpreted something the other character has said. What are the consequences? Is the chain of events that the error sets off tragic or funny, relatively insignificant or life-changing?
"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time." This book is a collection of Ernest Hemingway's comments on writing and reflections about his own process, gathered from his stories, essays, letters, and interviews. Hemingway's insights offer helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and the writing life.
The poet Cynthia Macdonald has died; Duke freshmen boycott Bechdel's Fun Home; Morrissey releases debut novel; and other news.
