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What They Knew #13
““The language belongs to fishermen, not scholars.” –Jorge Luis Borges (on efforts to impose an official diction on English) Continue reading
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Parks v. Sacks: Can A Novelist Make Magic?
Tim Parks is a novelist and critic. (The distinction is important.) Recently he wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books blog about the current state of novels, and what it means for today’s novelist. Parks’s essay, worth reading in its entirety, starts out slowly. Parks apparently feels compelled to describe (only to Continue reading
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Penelope Fitzgerald and Failure (and Free Fiction!)
Still thinking about Penelope Fitzgerald and being drawn to failure. And it made me think of this passage in The Race: A Novella (available now at Amazon.com!), in which the narrator first meets the Governor’s wife: “Who’s he?” Tina said to the Governor in the foyer. “My biographer!” I explained that it was actually an autobiography – Continue reading
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Failure and Penelope Fitzgerald
Oh, good lord. No wonder I love Penelope Fitzgerald so much. Here I thought it was the short length of her novels. Instead it’s the life experience: By that time, in her early sixties, Penelope Fitzgerald was long accustomed to humiliation and, far worse, to catastrophe. Indeed, her late flowering as a novelist of extraordinary Continue reading
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The Merry Band of Walking Felonies (Iconic Poet Edition)
Howl Redux I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, tired hungry desperate, playin’ a little Frogger on the Atari 2600… Related articles Bryan Cranston’s 1980s Atari 2600 Mega Force TV Commercial (geektyrant.com) Atari classic Pitfall reborn for iOS (reviews.cnet.com) The First Big Video Game Console, Now The Latest Tiny Continue reading
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The State of Publishing: The Sound of Ice Cracking
Yesterday I wrote about the possibility of small presses playing a key role in the publishing process – not as a filter deciding which books get published in the first place, but in their ability to make already published books more widely available. IntoPrint is a good example of how this might work: this small publishing house Continue reading
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Crashing the Gates: Self-Publishing and the National Book Awards
Fascinating look at the National Book Awards process from Eric Obenauf, publisher and editor of the press Two Dollar Radio. Obenauf’s jumping-off point is this year’s expansion to a longlist for fiction nominees (from five to ten), which sounded promising to him, as it did to all lovers of good fiction. Until, that is, he Continue reading
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A Self-Interview with the Author, Jacke Wilson
Today’s self-interview is with the author and sole proprietor of this blog, Jacke Wilson. Jacke’s novella The Race is available now at Amazon.com. Q: Thank you for sitting down with me today. A: It was no trouble at all. Q: How long have you been writing fiction? A: As a serious endeavor, approximately 18 years. Q: Continue reading
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Advice from Saint Stephen: Don’t Punch Down
Longtime readers will recall my struggles with tone. I honestly am trying to keep this blog positive, forward-looking, and helpful. A beacon of fairness and integrity. And yet… one of my most popular posts refers to a famous novelist as a Horse’s Ass. And then there’s the series of posts referring to a prominent reviewer Continue reading
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The Jacke Wilson One-Word Test: Are Your Themes What You Expected?
Years ago The New Yorker ran a cartoon after Ken Burns had just come out with his second major documentary, Baseball. (The first, of course, had been the masterpiece The Civil War.) The cartoon showed a man’s hand holding a piece of paper with “Ken Burns To-Do List” at the top. Underneath the title it said: WAR SPORTS Continue reading
Jacke Wilson 