This is some of the most powerful prose I’ve ever seen. It’s from a leaflet handed around during the 1992 primaries, written by Zoe Leonard, an artist and activist: I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone [...]
Steve Jobs died last night. I saw the news as soon as it broke and then sat there, stunned, watching Twitter light up. All I felt at first was shock — and then, slowly, creeping in like a slow mist, sadness: deep and visceral and with me still. I didn’t expect to feel this way. [...]
Dave Eggers, in a lovely tribute to his high school English teacher, Mr Criche, remembers getting back a paper with a short note on it that basically changed his life. It said: “Sure hope you become a writer.” Over the next 10 years, I thought often about Mr. Criche’s six words. Whenever I felt discouraged, [...]
My new story, The Diner on the Edge of Hell, is out in the latest issue of Weird Tales. Happiness! Here’s an excerpt: Petrie shrugged and sat back, chewing placidly, and looked around the diner. It was a spotless, perfect stereotype of a diner: bright porcelain tiles, harsh fluorescent lights, a juke box, a pinball [...]
Love this, from an interview with Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles: That’s the essence of reader response theory. There is no inherent meaning in a text. It’s what the reader makes of it, and authorial intention is irrelevant. Does that bother you? Yeah, it bothers me to the extent that the whole universe is like that, [...]
I’m nearing the end of two weeks of vacation. It’s an odd and disconcerting thing to have your days free, and I’ve tried to fill my time with constructive things: writing, chipping fecklessly away at various landfills of email, going to the gym, planning unconsummated trips to DC. Mostly it’s all just noise to stave [...]
John Moe: Being a writer in a world that features [David Foster] Wallace would be like playing basketball in a world that has Michael Jordan, only none of us even know how to play basketball and we’re all injured toddlers with broken lacrosse equipment.
Sometimes you hear people say that they don’t read fiction. Not that they don’t usually read fiction, or haven’t read fiction in a while, or don’t enjoy reading fiction. They don’t, as a matter of principle, read it at all. Nonfiction is ok, because nonfiction has facts, and you can use facts to improve yourself. [...]
The winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which applicants compete to write the worst first sentence of novel: For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she [...]
I’m trying to write a bio for a short story I’ve got coming up, and am having the usual terrible time figuring out what to say. Here are some options: Lapsed Cannibal splits his time between working on his perpetual stillness machine and looking for the end of Pi — where, he is given to [...]
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