Writing
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Brightening Your Day With a Little Little My
You wake up. Grumble your way to work. Slug down some coffee. Read some horror show news about people cheating America. It’s the end of March. There’s snow on the ground. Do you really want to blog about these stories? Like this one? Workers’ compensation insurance premium fraud is so commonplace that it costs the… Continue reading
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Small Press Shout-Out: The New Press!
One of the most gratifying aspects of giving small presses a shout-out is that so many of them have a strong sense of purpose. Whether it’s becoming a B Corporation, or providing us with passports to international crime fiction, or building a community around works about identity, or helping to put more Asian and Pacific Island diaspora literature… Continue reading
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How to Review Books by Alison Lurie
Man oh man. People, we have here a reviewer who has reached Stage Five on the scale of Great Book Reviews. An exciting development. What are the stages? Let’s see… Sometimes a reviewer makes you excited about a particular book. Let’s call that Stage One. Sometimes a reviewer makes you want to read all the… Continue reading
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Don’t Be Discouraged: You Are New!
Editor’s Note: In honor of springtime, I thought I’d rerun this post from last year, which remains one of the most popular posts we’ve had. Hope wins! In an interview with Tinhouse’s J.C. Hallman, Walter Kirn refers to a common anxiety among writers: J.C. Hallman: Do creative writers have an obligation to act as critics, to offer… Continue reading
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The Novella and the Tramp
Do you recognize this man? (Hint: He’s a genius.) If you guessed “Charlie Chaplin, film star,” you’re partially right. The correct answer is “Charlie Chaplin, film star and novella-ist. The Hollywood Reporter has the news: The only book Charlie Chaplin ever wrote has been restored and will soon be published by an Italian film restoration… Continue reading
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New Novella Release: The Promotion!
Another great day here on the Jacke Blog. I’m excited to announce the release of my new book, The Promotion: A Novella. Officially, The Promotion “is the deadpan cri de couer of a lawyer trapped inside a Kafkaesque firm, tasked with recruiting new attorneys even as he himself slides into obsession and madness.” Unofficially, it’s… Continue reading
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Popova on Woolf
I’m still absorbing yesterday’s Terrible Poem Breakdown and its use of the Druid. I still kind of like the poem! Undeniably terrible, but even so. Terrible poems with druids are not all bad. (Please don’t try to prove me wrong, poets!) Running through some research on the druids, I came across Maria Popova’s look at… Continue reading
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Print Version of The Race Available Now!
At long last, I’m happy to announce the print version of The Race: A Novella is here! The above image links to the book’s page at Amazon.com. You can also buy it directly from CreateSpace. I had a few minor hiccups with the CreateSpace process, but in general I found it fairly easy going, and I… Continue reading
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What They Knew #28
“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart… Continue reading
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Killer Poetry
We’ve had killer fiction on our radar screen for a while. Now here comes the tragic tale of… killer poetry! A former teacher was detained in Russia’s Urals after being accused of stabbing an acquaintance to death in a dispute about literary genres, investigators said Wednesday. The 67-year-old victim insisted that “the only real literature is… Continue reading
Jacke Wilson 