Recommended Reading

One of my graduate students has a short story (or prose poem, whatever) in Pindeldyboz. I like any story with a Ringo Starr reference.

Recommended Reading

One of my former FAU undergrads, Shaun Hutchinson, has published a young adult novel with Simon & Schuster:
Deathday Letter. A nice reminder that your best bet for a writing community is your classmates (not your teacher), and that CRW 3010 students are often serious business. And while I'm here, a shout out to the very first person I met in my first fiction workshop back when I was a college freshman, Alexander Woo, now an award-winning writer for the oh-so-popular True Blood.

p.s. In case you haven't noticed, the blog is pretty much on hiatus until further notice (read: when I feel like it).

Recommended Reading

One of my graduate students has a story published in the current Grey Sparrow Journal. Check it out.

Recommended Reading

My friend and colleague Becka McKay has translations in the latest issue of PEN America. Check it out.

Feed by M.T. Anderson

This futuristic young adult novel takes place in a world where anyone who nowadays would have an Internet connection at home essentially has it in their brains instead--this is called the feed. They can IM each other without talking, can look up any information they want, can share memories, and they stream ads pretty much continuously. They also have flying cars and party on the Moon and stuff like that, but the key to the novel is the feed. So introducing the feed to readers is not too hard and establishing its cool futuristic factor is not too hard. But what's interesting is Anderson chooses to have the feed malfunction for the narrator early in the novel and then come back. And that way the true value of the feed (and obvious negatives of the feed) are made very clear to readers. And so when the feed is at stake for another character, we get it... Most writers I think would have just established this cool (and horrifying) thing and then put it at risk. But Anderson establishes it, takes it away, gives it back, and then puts it at risk... kind of like the Turkish proverb that says if God wants you to appreciate soemthing he first takes it away and then gives it back to you. Philosophically sound and a good plot device.

Recommended Reading

One of my former undergraduates is doing a (second) tour in Iraq and blogging about it:

http://theexodusblog.blogspot.com/

Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

Content-wise, I wasn't as held by this short novel as much as by other Calvino works...but all the same it gave me new ideas about what can hold a novel together. Years ago in an nonfiction workshop one of my students, upon reading Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius said, it showed me new things writing can do... That feeling happens quite a bit when one first starts reading seriously as a writer... less so, the more you've read simply because you've been exposed to a lot more. But what I appreciated about this novel was how it's centered on a character's point of view--how he sees the world--more than on what happens to him. It reminded me in a few ways of The Mezzanine, perhaps it was an evolutionary step for Nicholson Baker. Anyway, my point is a lot of writers are wary of reading because they don't want to be influenced. But what I see in early classes is poorly read writers write really unimaginatively. In my experience, creativity is born of knowledge not of an absence of knowledge. So read on!