Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Kerry for getting a free copy of Survival By Storytelling Issue One from SBS Magazine.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Black Boxes by Caroline Smailes. Julie Myerson meets Ian McEwan in this gripping novel of family breakdown. Ana Lewis is trapped by her own expectations. Her intense relationship with fellow student Alex begins to crack beyond repair when she becomes pregnant, and his subsequent withdrawal, emotionally and sexually are hard for Ana to bear. Eventually, following the birth of Pip and then Davie, Alex leaves Ana to a life of question and blame. Locked in her room for much of the time she woefully neglects her children, preferring instead to replay scenes from her life over and over, fighting the urge to blink for fear it should dissipate the memories. Told within the context of two black boxes, one Ana’s and one Pip’s, the story reveals the key factors that have contributed to this catastrophic breakdown of life.
In the introduction to the third volume of the literary journal, Electric Literature, the editors lament the decline of traditional reading. Yet they also recognize the fact that we are all now reading more than ever, and at a faster pace: tweets, blogs, texts, and, yes, books. So instead of publishing a death notice for the literary age, the editors present an innovative collection of stories, mediums, and writers meant to challenge the idea of conventional literature. Read more »
Some of the greatest writers of our time have neglected the conventional image of a writer at his desk and opted instead for more unorthodox approaches.
Vladimir Nabokov wrote standing up at a lectern. He also wrote longhand, and only on index cards, so as to write scenes non-sequentially.
Philp Roth took Nabokov’s lead and added movement to his repertoire –– Roth claims to walk a half a mile for every page he writes.
Then there’s Tom Wolfe,. Wolfe was 6 feet 6 inches tall, so his reasoning for standing up might have been less about innovation than it was about finding a desk that wouldn’t destroy his knees.
II.
Then there were the horizontal writers. Read more »
Does book design matter to you? If you weren’t interested in reading these books before, do the spiffy new covers convince you to give the book a shot? I’m curious.
I’m about to start teaching creative writing and composition once a week to a group of 11th and 12th graders in Harlem. Many of them will struggle with basic reading and writing comprehension, but my goal is to get them excited about telling their own stories, but also to respect the craft: to understand that editing is an important part of any artistic process, that attention to details helps the final product, and that constant practice (via writing and reading regularly) can only make their own creative and academic writing better.
So what kind of stuff do I want to encourage them to read in order to get excited about books and about writing their own stories? My mind automatically goes to “the classics,” a list of books many of which I haven’t even read myself (cue the guilt). But are these the best works to get them excited?
The bigger question is this: Is a classic work of literature (fiction and nonfiction included) always “good” writing?
I don’t understand this anxiety about TV supplanting literature as the main cultural vessel for our stories. Why does it matter? To me, TV and literature are on the same team. It’s the stories themselves that matter: good stories are good stories, regardless of what medium they reach us through, and there are television shows on the air today that way down the line will be treated with the same level of legitimacy that the “classics” receive now. What’s really interesting is that I would bet that the few television shows that do endure will share the same basic themes as many of our most beloved and respected books. In fact, there have even been a couple of times that the most popular shows of our time have expressly borrowed or paid homage to “great” works of literature, adapting them for a modern audience. Here are a few of my favorite examples:
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Mel Bosworth for getting a free copy of Hot Springs by Geoffrey Becker.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Survival By Storytelling Issue One from SBS Magazine. Included in this volume are twelve short stories, seven poems, and one article, all by authors under the age of twenty-five. In addition, authors Paul Genesse (The Golden Cord and The Dragon Hunters) and T. M. Hunter (Heroes Die Young) have contributed two articles on the publishing industry and writing. From vampires struggling with identity to guilty lovers trying to raise the dead to humorous and dark tales of life, the first issue of Survival By Storytelling is sure to tingle the senses and remind us all that age has nothing to do with a good story.
This whole classic-literature-meets-monsters trend keeps getting weirder and weirder. The latest mashup is Mrs. Darcy vs The Aliens, which author Jonathan Pinnock describes as:
Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens is a slightly demented sequel to Pride and Prejudice, although it has been described more accurately as “not so much Pride and Prejudice’s sequel as its bastard offspring following a drunken one-night stand with the X-Files.”
Mostly, I like this idea because of the book trailer the author put together. It has Colin Firth in it, it’s in French, and it’s one of the weirdest book trailers I’ve ever seen.
If I could speak with one person dead or alive, I would want to chat with Jane Austen just so I could get her reaction to all these mashups. Given that she was apparently pretty risque and controversial in her day, I have a feeling she would think it all was a very good joke–what do you think?
I do think the Espresso book machine, the end of the return system, and embracing e-books and interactive derivatives could solve a lot of the bottom-line issues in publishing. I personally can’t think of a single other industry that knowingly pulps nearly half of their product!
But Moriah Jovan’s post on the perfect bookstore makes it sound as if all of publishing’s problems are instantly solved with print-on-demand. There is a lot to consider though in the adoption of POD technology.
So what's in the David Foster Wallace archive? http://ow.ly/1gRiZ19 hours ago
Literary basketball team names: W.E.B & Da Boys, To Kill a Blocking Bird, The Fastbreaks of Wrath. Can you think of any? http://ow.ly/1h8h819 hours ago
"I’ve no idea how you’ve done it, but you’ve managed to assemble the book stack of my nightmares." http://ow.ly/1gRkv19 hours ago
"The Great Gatsby" one of America's 40 worst books? Do you agree? (For the record: we don't.) http://ow.ly/1gRkK19 hours ago
10 movies that were better than the books. http://ow.ly/1gRiM22 hours ago
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This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by The Friday Project. Read more »
In the introduction to the third volume of the literary journal, Electric Literature, the editors lament the decline of traditional reading. Yet they also recognize the fact that we are all now reading more than ever, and at a faster pace: tweets, blogs, texts, and, yes, books. So instead of publishing a death notice for the literary age, the editors present an innovative collection of stories, mediums, and writers meant to challenge the idea of conventional literature. 
