http://wordpirates.org The home of the Word Pirates Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:41:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en John Edgar Wideman—author of about two dozen books, MacArthur genius grant recipient and winner of PEN/Faulker, O. Henry and James Fennimore Cooper awards—is publishing another book. No news there ... until one notices that the publisher is Lulu, the self-publishing service. From Wideman's statement in a Lulu press release: "Lulu seems to ... http://wordpirates.org/2010/03/05/penfaulkner-winner-self-publishes-with-lulu/ History.com has a cool feature called this day in literary history. It mentions a notable literary event for every day of the year. Today March 5, for instance, Charlotte Bronte wrote to the Reverend Henry Nussey, declining marriage. "The 23-year-old Bronte told him that he would find her "romantic and ... http://wordpirates.org/2010/03/05/this-day-in-literary-history/ On the heels of the Guardian's great list of rules for writers, which offered well-known authors' advice on writing, Salon offers its own advice on writing. However, this time the advice is coming from the reader's point of view. An example: 2. Make your main character do something. ... [M]any writers gravitate ... http://wordpirates.org/2010/02/27/reader-advice-to-writers/ This article from the Guardian is well worth reading. "Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts." I cherry-picked my favorite rules below: Anne Enright: 1 The first 12 years are the worst. [Only 2 more to go...] Richard Ford: 6 Don't drink and write ... http://wordpirates.org/2010/02/23/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction/ The Brow Beat blog over at Slate looked at every poem in the New Yorker over the last few years and found that 27 percent of them were about writing poetry. How meta! Is it furtive pandering, since it's likely that only poets read the poems in the New Yorker? ... http://wordpirates.org/2010/02/14/new-yorker-loves-poems-about-poetry/ William Faulkner got a good deal of the inspiration for Go Down, Moses from a plantation diary that has just been discovered. It was written in the mid-1800s by Mississippi plantation owner Francis Terry Leak, whose great-grandson, Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr., was a childhood friend of Faulkner. The New York ... http://wordpirates.org/2010/02/11/the-diaries-that-inspired-faulkner/ Harper's Magazine is struggling. They are seeing drops in newsstand sales, advertisers, and subscriptions rates, among other things. That's sad because the magazine has been around since 1850 and has published some of our most brilliant writers. So, aside from being a little dense--who has time for 10,000-word Harper's article ... http://wordpirates.org/2010/02/10/slate-on-harpers-magazine/ My short story "End of the Line" is in the 2010 issue of So to Speak. Published by George Mason University, So to Speak is a feminist journal of language of art. "End of the Line" is about an old woman, Mrs. Dumas, who accidentally takes the wrong bus and ... http://wordpirates.org/2010/02/03/joy-in-so-to-speak/ I am slowly making my way through Dante's Inferno. It's the first time I've read the book all the way through and I am struck by how incredibly visual it is. I have to wonder a bit about the mind of a man who can think of so many horrible ... http://wordpirates.org/2010/02/02/dantes-inferno-as-video-game/ With all those technology types talking about carrying around all our books in one little piece of plastic, it's kind of refreshing to the contrarian in me to see this enormous book that takes six people just to lift it.The 350-year-old Klencke, the world's largest book, will be on display ... http://wordpirates.org/2010/01/30/worlds-largest-book-at-british-library/