Month: January 2010
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Reports of the Death of Fiction Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Readers with a hunger for “socially conscious writing” will turn away from fiction regardless of how “engaged” it is, precisely because it fundamentally remains fiction and because the hunger for “issues” and “reality” precludes a serious toleration of and investment in anything that is by definition not real.
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Fiction Dies. Again.
Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, finds contemporary fiction languishing on life-support and puts forth his diagnosis on the cause of its imminent death.
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The Other Seven-Eighths of the Iceberg
I have a short article on Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg theory and the resurgence of interest in his notorious six-word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”) in the latest issue of Philament.
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A Statement of Something Other Than Intention
First there were litblogs like Bookslut and ReadySteadyBook, largely dedicated to literary news and gossip. Then came “critblogs” like The Reading Experience and The Existence Machine, more interested in generating a substantive and sustained conversation about particular literary matters. In these pages, I too want to engage in literary discussion, but I want to engage…