How to Write With Style.
posted on Jul 13, 2008 - View this thread

Happy Birthday, Anne Carson! The iconoclastic modern poet who published the arresting, compulsively readable Autobiography of Red turned 57 this weekend.
posted on Jun 23, 2008 - View this thread

Canadian writer Craig Davidson is pretty intense (read mad) when it comes to research and promoting his work, entering into an officially sanctioned boxing match to promote The Fighter. But even he thinks he went a bit too far when he went on a full 'steroid cycle'.
posted on May 19, 2008 - View this thread

50 best cult books from The Telegraph.
posted on Apr 26, 2008 - View this thread

Henry Miller Bathroom Monologues, part 2, part 3, and follow on - Miller takes us on a tour of the art in his bathroom. And a few years later, we have Dinner with Henry, 1979 .
posted on Apr 6, 2008 - View this thread

Vladimir Nabokov discusses Lolita with Lionel Trilling.
posted on Apr 3, 2008 - View this thread

Inside Jeopardy: An interview with former writer/researcher Carlo Panno [Part 2] [Part 3]
posted on Mar 31, 2008 - View this thread

"I'm not a politician, I'm an artist. Depravity is part of the job description," says self-styled dandy, former drug addict, and controversial British author Sebastian Horsely, who was denied entrance to the US by customs officials at Newark Airport on the grounds of "moral turpitude," a wide net that encompasses everything from fornication to being a "nuisance." Shades of Oscar Wilde.
posted on Mar 21, 2008 - View this thread

"And by magic, I mean me drinking a lot of coffee and not bathing for days while sitting in my PJ's and drawing comics until the wee hours of the morning." Gasp at comics creator Mike Allred's lovely home! Admire artist Stuart Immonen's tastfully furnished work area! And marvel at writer Mark Waid's piles and piles of comic crap! Click the [more inside] for more studio tours guided by your favorite funnybook creators! And Mark Millar, too!
posted on Mar 8, 2008 - View this thread

Poet, playwright, novelist, mural painter, experimentalist, illustrator; a “fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian”; and perhaps “the greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott,” Alasdair Gray has a new book out.
posted on Feb 20, 2008 - View this thread

Who's the new darling of the literary world? Charles Bock. Although, some are asking, how the hell did a guy like him get all this high-profile coverage? [Bock previously on MeFi]
posted on Feb 5, 2008 - View this thread

Diary Junction. "An internet resource for those interested in historical and literary diaries and diarists." Information pages on over five hundred diarists are included.
posted on Jan 12, 2008 - View this thread

The 50 greatest British writers since 1945. A few interesting choices here... the 'novelist's poet' at #1 seems fair enough, but this one, this one and this one?
posted on Jan 7, 2008 - View this thread

Pictures of writers in a thread on I Love Music. Lots and lots of pictures of lots of writers. Another thread from the same board with more pictures (some duplicates). Author photos are most often seen on dust jackets or in the back of books, a practice Frances Wilson wishes to see abolished. One famous connoisseur of pictures of writers is Javier Marías who wrote a whole book on the subject, Written Lives. Here are a few excerpts from the book: William Faulkner, Isak Dinesen (pen name of Karen Blixen) and an edited extract covering a whole lot of authors.
posted on Dec 24, 2007 - View this thread

Reflection's Edge, a monthly fiction zine (back issues), has many resources for writers, including slang/dialect (don't miss the links to Texas Talk, the Internet Guide to Jazz Age Slang, or the 1736 Canting Dictionary), writing advice and interviews, and advice on how to sell your story.
posted on Dec 10, 2007 - View this thread

As the WGA strike enters its second week, the writers have begun to flood the internet with brief videos explaining (and even making light of) their situation. A small collection after the jump.
posted on Nov 14, 2007 - View this thread

Striking Out by James Surowiecki. "As TV writers hit the picket lines, Surowiecki discusses the motivations and consequences of labor strikes. Historically, he argues, strikes have rarely ended up benefiting workers; the deals reached are usually similar to offers on the table before workers walk out. So why strike? For one thing, he writes, striking may clarify how serious your employer is about his stated position. And strikes are often about fairness, rather than economics -- people tend to reject deals they view as unfair, even when doing so leaves them worse off. A cogent analysis offering some interesting, timely tidbits of economic theory." [via]
posted on Nov 13, 2007 - View this thread

As the Writer's Guild of America strike wears on into its second week, it seems appropriate to remember why they're striking in the first place. If you ask me, the terms seem almost too reasonable. But in the defense of the studios, I'm sure the businessmen involved have gotten used to spending those millions of dollars, and wouldn't want to see them go. Now that Broadway has shut down in allegiance to their Hollywood compatriots, things are looking grim for anything to be resolved without more financial bloodshed.
posted on Nov 10, 2007 - View this thread

Writer's Links. Write better, or at the very least, more authentically, with this list of hundreds of resources for writers of all shades. For example, writing a jazz age screenplay? This guide to 1920's slang will be handy. Need help getting your procedural legal drama accurate? Try the Jurisdictionary. Enjoy tormenting your readers? This list of Tom Swifties will do the trick nicely.
posted on Sep 9, 2007 - View this thread

You might recognise him from just about every American TV series ever made (as well as a few films). However, you're missing out unless you watch his podcasts. He's also a very funny writer. Thank God for Taylor Negron. He's not too proud of this
posted on Aug 14, 2007 - View this thread

Writers on Writing: Interviews with Paul Bowles, David Markson, and Harry Mathews.
posted on Jul 2, 2007 - View this thread

Le Conversazioni: Last summer a group of writers including David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, and Jeffrey Eugenides gathered on the Isle of Capri to discuss language and identity. This year's lineup includes Ethan Coen, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Claire Messud, and Chuck Palahniuk.
posted on May 31, 2007 - View this thread

Readersvoice.com is a lovely, low key site that interviews authors in a down to earth fashion that you normally don't see. The whole approach is wonderfully refreshing and endlessly fascinating.
posted on May 15, 2007 - View this thread

Who is Chuck Klosterman? in case you've never heard of the author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (among others - discussed here and here), you have now. [More Inside]
posted on Mar 9, 2007 - View this thread

The Diary of John Cam Hobhouse. Hobhouse ^(Wiki) (1786-1869) was a close friend of George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, and "Hobby-O's" diary contains a vivid account of Hobhouse's friendship and travels with Byron. As editor Peter Cochran writes: "Educated at Westminster and Trinity College Cambridge, [Hobhouse] travelled east with Byron in 1809, was Best Man at Byron’s wedding in 1815, travelled across Switzerland in Byron’s company in 1816 after the separation, around Rome with Byron in 1817, and lived with Byron in Venice in the same year. He met Byron at Pisa again in 1822, after Byron’s facetious poem on his imprisonment in Newgate, My Boy Hobby-O, had almost terminated their friendship. As a member of the London Greek Committee he encouraged Byron on his last journey in 1823; and had he insisted, Byron’s memoirs would almost certainly not have been destroyed in 1824." (Memoirs which, in hindsight, are considered a "missing masterpiece.") Also read Hobhouse's account of Byron's funeral.
posted on Nov 1, 2006 - View this thread

Chris Columbus's Indiana Jones and the Monkey King and Jeb Stuart's Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars are just two rejected sequel scripts for the Indiana Jones franchise. Tom Stoppard, Steven Gaghan, Jeffrey Boam, M. Night Shyamalan, and Frank Darabont each submitted treatments and scripts of their own, but Steven Spielberg and George Lucas (or, more probably, just George Lucas) swatted down every idea until finally Jeff Nathanson's concept was greenlighted--and even that's still being reworked by David Koepp. But with Harrison Ford now older than Sean Connery was in Last Crusade and Steven Spielberg still hobbled by other commitments, it's not clear that Indiana Jones 4 won't be just another false start. The only Indy movie that looks at all certain is the one that Daniel Clowes is making.
posted on Sep 21, 2006 - View this thread

America's Next Top Picket Line Writers from America's Next Top Model have gone on strike after the Writers Guild of America West began a campaign to unionize reality TV. How many strikes do you know have their own MySpace page, Television without Pity interview, and a model "working it" on the picket line? Ironically, a previous 1988 writers' strike encouraged the current boom in reality TV, as this article argues.
posted on Sep 12, 2006 - View this thread

Virginia Woolf the cricketer, the beach belle posing in a stripy bathing suit or as the March Hare at an Alice in Wonderland-themed party.
For the first time, 1,000 photographs from Woolf's private album and that of her sister, Vanessa Bell, have been catalogued and published. More inside. (via litterae)
posted on Apr 15, 2006 - View this thread

Riyadh International Book Fair. "Last night I went to a panel on cultural diversity, and I have enjoyed a very good discussion. The panel was done the Saudi style, with the only female speaker Dr. Khairia Al-Saggaf talking from another room, where we could not see her but only listen to her voice." "Shiites were the subject of a hot debate at the end of the panel, when Dr. Khaled Al-Dakheel said that Shiites are part of us. This was the point where the panel went out of control. Before Al-Dakheel was able to complete that sentence, a Sheikh from the first row interrupted and told Dr. Al-Dakheel that Shiites are not Muslims, and that he has to say this."
posted on Mar 3, 2006 - View this thread

Hot on the heels of the JT Leroy and James Frey fracases, here's a list of other literary frauds. Writing is lying, indeed. [via Bookslut]
posted on Jan 10, 2006 - View this thread

PICTURE THIS: A folksy, self-consciously plainspoken Southern politician rises to power during a period of profound unrest in America. The nation is facing one of the half-dozen or so of its worst existential crises to date, and the people, once sunny, confident, and striving, are now scared, angry, and disillusioned. Through a combination of factors -his easy bearing chief among them (along with massive cash donations from Big Business; disorganization in the liberal opposition; a stuffy, aloof opponent; and support from religious fanatics who feel they've been unfairly marginalized)-he wins the presidential election. Ripped from today's headlines? Nope. Sinclair Lewis, Circa 1935: "It Can't Happen Here" has been recently reissued. But you can read it here (with free registration) at American Buddha (possibly NSFW). first link via Arts & Letters Daily
posted on Dec 28, 2005 - View this thread

On December 16th the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk goes on trial charged with insulting the Turkish nation, after stating that the killing of 30,000 Armenians and Kurds by the Ottoman Empire was genocide (as discussed before). The trial is being seen by some as a key test for Turkey as it starts on the road to EU accession. Listen to him talk about his work and read extracts.
posted on Nov 30, 2005 - View this thread

"The spiritual, physical, intellectual, social or economic well-being of the general public".
Within the MacDowell Colony's rustic stone and clapboard cottages, Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town, Aaron Copland composed Appalachian Spring and Dubose and Dorothy Heyward wrote Porgy and Bess. Jonathan Franzen finished writing The Corrections and Alice Sebold worked on The Lovely Bones. For decades, the town considered the colony a tax-exempt charitable organization. Not anymore.
posted on Nov 14, 2005 - View this thread

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
After Life, by Joan Didion. (bugmenot for NYTimes)
posted on Sep 25, 2005 - View this thread

"If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant," Mr. Palomar thinks, "and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen." He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.
In memoriam of Italo Calvino, who died exactly 20 years ago.
"Calvino's novels" by his friend Gore Vidal. Calvino's obituary by Vidal, il maestro William Weaver's essay on Calvino's cities, Jeanette Winterson on Calvino's dream of being invisible, and Stefano Franchi's philosophical study on Palomar's doctrine of the void. More inside.
posted on Sep 18, 2005 - View this thread

Flaubert on Structural Unity. "I’ve just read 'Pickwick' by Dickens. Do you know it? Some bits are magnificent; but what a defective structure! All English writers are like that. Walter Scott apart, they lack composition. This is intolerable for us Latins". Extracts from the letters of Flaubert (via the very awesome book coolie)
posted on Jul 29, 2005 - View this thread

youngman, there's no need to feel down.

Originally rejecting a ghetto-tag of 'gay writer', John Rechy's early work describes aspects of US gay subculture, pre-Stonewall, and pre-HIV, that was necessarily a closed book to outsiders at that point in time

Rechy is still writing, and today, his website features blog-like commentary and interesting thoughts on writing.
posted on Jul 25, 2005 - View this thread

Do you know your rhetoric? You can hear how it is used in the top 100 American speeches of all time, 63 of which have the original audio recordings! (prev.) The list has some odd omissions, such as the Gettysburg Address (and here in convenient presentation form) and non-American speakers like Churchill, so this shorter international list may be useful. While the slow decline in the quality of presidential addresses is much lamented, scriptwriters are stepping up, see for example, top movie speeches of all time ("Smells like victory" beats "You can't handle the truth"). So, MeFiers, do any of these still inspire, or is rhetoric dead?
posted on May 24, 2005 - View this thread

Infected warthog anus boogers!Author and iconoclast; or freak? If you spent any time in downtown Toronto in the 80's you likely saw Crad Kilodney, Dead Man Talking.
posted on Apr 26, 2005 - View this thread

Frank Conroy Dies at 69 The author of "Stop-Time," jazz pianist, scallop fisherman, and Iowa writers workshop guru disappears into the divine...
posted on Apr 8, 2005 - View this thread

Mythmaker of the Machine Age. In the statue erected above his grave in Amiens, in Picardy, Jules Verne, who died exactly 100 years ago, resembles God. He is, after all, the second-most-translated author on earth, after Agatha Christie. To celebrate the anniversary, there's a Verne exhibition at the Maritime Museum in Paris, one of a series of events from Paris to the western city of Nantes, where Verne was born on Feb. 8, 1828, to the northern town of Amiens, where he died on March 24, 1905. His many fans, some of them quite famous, will be treated to exhibits, concerts, films and shows in Verne's honor. “Underground City”, a lost classic written by Verne and never before published unabridged in English, emerges this month in not one but two new unique editions.
100 years later, questions remain about his life: Why did he have two homes in Amiens? Why did he burn all his private papers? Why was he shot in the foot by his nephew, Gaston, in 1886? Gaston was locked in an asylum for 54 years after his attack on L'Oncle Jules. Was Gaston, in fact, Verne's natural son? More inside.
posted on Mar 23, 2005 - View this thread

Tired of having to go through directors and producers, more and more screenwriters have their own websites to speak directly to the public (and to speak privately to each other.) Craig Mazin (screenwriter of the upcoming Opus the Penguin film) talks about why the hero aims low and how the screenwriter is like the Director of Photography. John Rogers worked on Catwoman and says "The one tiny shred of my artistic integrity I can take out of that process is that I've never actually seen the movie". Max Adams (whose Excess Baggage is reputed to be one of the best scripts ever made into a crappy movie) talks about how scripts get ruined. William Martell (the Robert Towne of made-for-cable movies) thinks it's a mistake to be too original. Terry Rossio (co-author of Pirates of the Caribbean reveals the physics of the story molecule. (Terry Rossio's site was mentioned in this thread on screenwriter John August's website but is worthy of a front page post of its own.)
posted on Feb 8, 2005 - View this thread

Jack London was a prolific writer best known for White Fang, The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf. However, he also wrote about his experiences as a hobo, a socialist and a journalist. While most biographies portray his life as vibrant and engaged, his legacy and arguable suicide has some troublesome baggage.
posted on Feb 3, 2005 - View this thread

Although cancer got these three young writers before their books were published, their now-acclaimed work -- from children's inspirational to humorous fantasy to coming of age (book and movie) -- was brought to life by the efforts of parents or a brother or friends.
posted on Dec 14, 2004 - View this thread

Nick Bantock's gorgeous Griffin and Sabine series is based on mail art, a medium with a long history. Developed in the mid-20th century by Ray Johnson and his contemporaries, today the community thrives, with the internet allowing dissemination beyond the reach of point-to-point mail.
posted on Dec 13, 2004 - View this thread

The DNA of Litrature. Between now and next July, The Paris Review will be putting all of its writers-at-work interviews online, starting with those from the 1950s, which include William Faulkner, Truman Capote and Dorothy Parker. Good stuff.
posted on Nov 15, 2004 - View this thread

Anne Sexton, American Poet.......172 of her poems online I am reading a biography on her and thought I would share with the class. She had a tough time.
posted on Sep 16, 2004 - View this thread

Two Writers Drinking, Sitting Around, Talking About Stuff. That about says it! Two online veterans get drunk and exchange e-mails. (An ongoing series. The above link is part one. Part two is here, and part three can be found right here). (Via Maud)
posted on Aug 22, 2004 - View this thread

"Hubert Selby died often. But he always came back, smiling that beautiful smile of his, and those blue eyes of his... This time he will not be back. My saints have always come from hell, and now, with his passing, there are no more saints". Selby is the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, (tried for obscenity in England and supported by, among many others, Samuel Beckett and Anthony Burgess), Requiem For a Dream, Song of the Silent Snow. He is being eulogized in the USA and UK, but also, massively (I've just watched a fantastic TV special) in France, where he is much more popular than in his native land (Selby's death was the cover story -- plus pages 2, 3 and 4 -- in the daily Libération today -- .pdf file): Dernière sortie vers la rédemption, L'extase de la dévastation. What makes all this kind of ironic -- in a very Selbyesque way -- is that Selby himself used to say, "I started to die 36 hours before I was born..." (more inside)
posted on Apr 28, 2004 - View this thread

So You Think You Might Be A Writer? Just because you write? An astute essay by Joseph Epstein poses the uncomfortable question: are you weird enough? There's something very unnatural and unhealthy about writing (as opposed to reading, for instance) - but what is it? [Via Arts and Letters Daily.]
posted on Apr 19, 2004 - View this thread