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The Chicago Reader is taking submissions for their annual fiction issue. Submit now through Nov. 10 -- details are here.

We can't neglect NaNoWriMo.

Feeling all jazzed up, hopped up, caff'd up and ready to write?
Want to commit a month of your free time to nonstop novel action?

It's that time of year: National Novel Writing Month (aka, NaNoWriMo)! Beginning Nov. 1, a whole bunch of crazy people will attempt to write novels in ONE MONTH. I have not done this, and thus I cannot recommend it. But I know a few brave souls who have participated, and I admire their tenacity and hearty embrace of creative discipline.
More details at NaNoWriMo's official site.

Start stretching your typing fingers and outlining now, if you're willing to take the plunge.

Happy happy joy joy...

New place for fiction on the Web: Joyland. 

Cause for celebration? A regional spin on fiction submissions. 

Joyland is dedicated to finding a new way to publish short fiction. We’ve chosen several editors to select and post stories by authors in a given locale.

Editors in Toronto, Chicago, LA, Montreal, New York and Vancouver (the site started in Canada).

The Offutt Guide to Literary Terms

memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

short story: An essay written to conceal the truth and protect the writer’s family.

chick lit: A patriarchal term of oppression for heterosexual female writing; also, a marketing means to phenomenal readership and prominent bookstore space.

pop culture essay: An essay written by someone who prefers to shop or watch television.

Excerpts of an excerpt in Harpers. 

Written by Chris Offut.

'Desdemona Talks Dirty'

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A few months ago, I read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a slowly paced character meditation through the voice of an aging minister. The book won a Pulitzer, which seemed promising, but I never quite fell into it or truly understood it. This profile of the author helps me understand... why I was so far out of touch with the novel.

Sure enough, here are the multivolume "Commentaries" of the great 16th-century Protestant theologian, whom Robinson considers one of the most falsely caricatured figures in history. Here are the two volumes of Calvin's "Institutes of the Christian Religion," without which she thinks you can't understand Herman Melville. Surrounding these are a multitude of other theological and educational works, few less than a century old.
...
As a constant reader growing up in Idaho in the 1940s and '50s, she was obsessed with, among other things, the works of Edgar Allan Poe. "You can't believe how much Poe poetry I can recite to this day," she says now.
A demonstration is requested. She responds with the opening lines of "Alone":

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from the common spring.

Poe wrote these lines in 1830. But they could just as easily have been written by Marilynne Robinson in 2008.

From "At 'Home' With the Past" in The Washington Post

Another profile in The Times of London calls her the world's best writer of prose...

Show me the money...

Seth Abramson, who blogs at The Suburban Ecstasies (his site) and on the MFA blog, has written a great round-up of MFA program funding for Poets & Writers magazine.

Today, the top candidates for the nation's most selective MFA programs can expect free tuition, free health insurance, and no student fees during the two to four years of their graduate study in addition to a generous stipend for living expenses—sometimes without having anything expected of them in return besides producing their best creative work.

The full story (titled "Show Me the Money") is here (and linked via his own blog posts...).

Poets & Writers also has an updated MFA Tool Kit with info on teaching assistantships, the application process, a listing of US programs and more.

The Right Stuff!

Author Tom Wolfe will speak Thursday, 6 p.m., at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. The free event is full BUT they'll have video feed in the library, and if you get there early, you could try to beg your way in. He'll hang out for book signing afterward...
Details here.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

Aravind Adiga, 33, won the 40th Man Booker prize on Tuesday night for his debut novel, “The White Tiger,” a vivid exploration of India’s class struggle told through the story of a village boy who becomes the chauffeur to a rich man.

From the New York Times.

ALSO: 2008 National Book Award Nominees announced

Maybe it's better to be a late bloomer...

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.

What happens when an economist sets out to quantify whether genius happens early in life... or later? David Galenson polled a group of literary scholars about what they consider the top poems in the 20th Century American canon.

The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.

I'm starting to feel better about not having a book deal at age 9...
From Late Bloomers by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker.
Art also from the New Yorker.

AND more good reading in the New Yorker:
Sleep by Roddy Doyle.

It was the thing he’d always loved about her. The way she could sleep. When they’d just started going with each other, before they really knew each other, he’d lie awake, hoping she’d wake up, praying for it, dying. But even then he’d loved to look at her while she slept. There was something about it that made him feel lucky, or privileged. Or trusted. She could do that beside him, turn everything off, all the defenses, and let him watch her.

Boy genius?

Do you ever feel shame, failure, low self-esteem, or a disheartening sense of aging when you hear about those prodigious authors who land book deals at freakishly young ages? The still-in-college, winning-rave-reviews, Pulitzer-finalist types make me feel so... inadequate.
Case in point: Alec Greven, a 9-year-old Colorado resident, has a TWO BOOK DEAL with HarperCollins. His books: "How to Talk to Girls" and "How to Talk to Girls II." I can't make this stuff up.

Among his tips:
– You’re better off with a “regular girl” than a “pretty girl.” (Alec defines pretty girls as the ones who wear “fancy earrings, fancy dresses, all those shoes.”) According to Alec, “about 73 percent of regular girls ditch boys, 98 percent of pretty girls ditch boys.”

From "A 9-year-old author tells us ‘How to Talk to Girls’" in the Christian Science Monitor.

My copy editor died.

Well, not my copy editor. Someone else's copy editor.

My copy editor died.
No need to be upset on my account. I hadn’t seen Helene Pleasants for at least 10 years before her death; and even those closest to her would agree that her death was timely. After a long life, with one great adventure at its heart, many pleasures and pitfalls, Helene died at the age of 93. Hopefully, she died in her sleep. Helene would have killed me for that last sentence.
....
“You need Helene” was a phrase I used only last year when a writer, just starting out, asked me to read his first manuscript. I read the manuscript with Helene’s eye and ear, which is the way I read everything. What Helene taught me I can’t unlearn, any more than I can unlearn how to swim. And when I had finished reading, I made this young writer an offer:

“I had Helene,” I said. “You need a Helene. If you like, I’ll be your Helene.” But when my writer realized what having a Helene meant — his sentences picked apart, his every intention and decision questioned — he politely declined. I hardly blame him. I’d like to believe that he’ll rue the day, but I doubt it. Nobody has Helene’s standards; nobody reads like Helene anymore. And I’ve changed my mind: it is a pity that Helene died. As long as she lived, I could still think of myself as a young writer.

From What My Copy Editor Taught Me in the New York Times.

And the Nobel goes to...

...some French guy.

French Writer Wins Nobel Prize
in the New York Times

Consonants and vowels about Sarah Vowell...

Ask Sarah Vowell a simple question -- like, say, "What turned you into the kind of person who would immerse yourself in the writings of 17th-century New England Puritans and write a book about them?" -- and within five minutes she's telling you about the time she became a human paintbrush in a piece of performance art.


From Then Meditation: For Sarah Vowell, the Past and Present Are Always in the Picture in Wednesday's Washington Post.

Have you ever found yourself saying...

...gee, I wish it appeared I had a lot more books? Say, a veritable library of books?

Well, thank goodness, the interior design world has come to the rescue.

Maybe you could use some wallpaper?

Or a faux-book side table?
A round-up of options is posted on Apartment Therapy.

Book Club Fiction

Love: the idea of "book club fiction," discussed by lit agent Nathan Bransford on his blog, This Week in Publishing. 

From his post: 

Around the publishing industry there has long been a hankering for a certain type of book that is both literary and yet commercial, familiar and yet exotic, well-written but not too dense, accessible but with some depth. They are books that are kind of tough to categorize, because they don't exactly fit into any one genre. I'd often hear people calling them either literary commercial fiction or commercial literary fiction.

But during my last trip to New York I heard an apt label for this category: book club fiction*. And lots of editors want it.

What books are in this category? Think:
LIFE OF PI
CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME
THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE
THE KITE RUNNER
EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
THE LOVELY BONES
SECRET LIFE OF BEES

Link to the posting is here, but check out This Week in Publishing in general for some helpful tips on querying lit agents, publishing insight and other good inside-baseball (inside-publishing) tidbits.

The World's Best Paid Authors

From Forbes magazine:

JK Rowling
James Patterson
Stephen King
Tom Clancy
Danielle Steel

Sarah Palin: Contemporary poet?

From Slate: 

"On Good and Evil"
It is obvious to me
Who the good guys are in this one
And who the bad guys are.
The bad guys are the ones
Who say Israel is a stinking corpse,
And should be wiped off
The face of the earth.

That's not a good guy.
(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)

See the full story here.