There is something unique about genre fiction. Perhaps it is the notion that great fiction should offer an escape. Perhaps it is with only these types of stories that true escapism can be attained some small path to temporary nirvana not found in other genres. That’s what we like to […]
The Varying Poverties of Now In the appendix to his brief but radiant 2010 manifesto ‘Reality Hunger’—a supremely confident and practically pedagogical collage of quotations and personal observations published in order to define a perceived new age of literature—David Shields writes with this kind of over-excited, unnecessarily aggressive tone. He’s […]
Pam van Hylckama Vlieg started her literary career as assistant to Laurie McLean, of Foreword Literary Agency, in early 2012. By April Pam was promoted to Associate Agent. In her first two years as an agent, Pam brokered 24 deals, with such publishers as Knopf, Scholastic, NAL, ACE, Grand Central, and others. […]
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt The reception Donna Tartt has garnered for her third novel, her first in twelve years, might be called a phenomenon. It’s a brilliant book, an enthralling story that centers on the childhood and youth of Theo Decker, an ordinary boy living in New York City with […]
Multiple award-winning editor Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for almost thirty years. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION and has edited more than fifty anthologies, including the horror half of the long-running The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Ellen is […]
Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. ~William Shakespeare Although it can certainly be argued to the contrary, it seems that humans are the only creatures who use spoken language as opposed to creatures that “merely” communicate. And although human language has existed for ages, written […]
I would love to write a novel. Not (necessarily) the Next Great American Novel, but something substantial, something tangible, something I can hold in my hands and say, “This is mine!”, something of which I can be selfish and proud. A short story would work, too, or a novella, but […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.