Square Pegs

Why does the Wall Street Journal keep so much content under lock and key? Why does The Washington Post have a such a complex registration process? And, why would Michel Dansel (The Train to Nowhwere) write 233 pages without a verb? According to Publisher’s Lunch, an author in France has done just this. We’d love to start our day with answers to at least our final question, but really don’t want to hassle with the WSJ. We really want to understand why we would want to suffer this for so long: In that carriage, between the grumpy woman oozing vulgarity […]

Another one via Sarah Weinman (we can only believe it’s much cooler where she is — lots of cool stuff on her site this week). As mentioned, oh, a billion times, we love meaty author interviews. When the author sets aside any pretense of political correctness and tells the truth. In this interview, Loren D. Estleman is refreshingly honest about his talent (well, honest and confident — both were cool to read about) and his work. Since Sarah nabbed the killer (no pun intended) quote, we’ll add a few that caught our attention. Estleman on writing to formula: Of course,

Sarah Weinman has posted a full list of nominees for the 2003 Barry Awards, to be announced at this year’s Boucheron (which we’ve always wanted to attend just to hear how many different ways the word can be pronounced). It’s hot, we’re lazy, and Sarah’s reproduced the full list, so follow the link below. We’re quite excited by at least one finalist. Darn it, we’re not as lazy as we hoped — we dropped by the Deadly Pleasures website…what an interesting approach they took in the nominating process. Nominees from the previous year cannot be nominated in the current year.

We don’t get the concept of a beach or summer read. We live in Southern California — we’ve never quite pinpointed when this so-called summer begins (though we know it’s sometime between awards season and the ever-growing Christmas season). We normally pass by these reading lists, not because we don’t like lists (we’re big on lists, actually), but because we’re not sure they’re meant for us. So we were ever-so-unaware of Australian author John Birmingham’s inclusion on a list of trashy novels to read this summer. We like his style, and couldn’t resist this quote: “The people that do well

Keen literary minds on the Internet (in other words, not ours) are discussing Charles Taylor’s Salon article on literature and reading, and many take a different view of the piece than we did (see below to play along at home). We love reading all the viewpoints. Taylor’s article was a direct response to Andrew Solomon’s New York Times editorial, the thesis of which was that reading is inherently harder than watching television or playing video games. We still believe that kind of sweeping generalization destroys his basic argument. Solomon says there is a great divide between readers and non-readers —

We promise you, nobody takes reading more seriously than we do (although we will admit that in the past few years, we have discovered this newfangled invention called television thanks to a most beautiful concept called TiVo). We read like we breathe. Actually, given our tendency toward allergies, we probably read better. To give an example of how important reading is to us, we refer back to our elbow surgery. Not only did the operation make it difficult to hold a book, but the painkillers…oh, they made us dizzy. Too dizzy to read. We ceased with the painkillers. Yes, you

We’re sending this one out to our author friend Jill. Jill isn’t crazy about the big rewrite, despite our cheerleading on the subject (Rewriting is Fun! We Love to Rewrite!). Perhaps it’s the way we describe our process (or maybe that we can’t rhyme) — basically, it’s sort of like taking out the trash and then realizing we have to snatch one or two items back. Then we’ll probably throw them away again. We have the best time during this process. We have even pulled a John Irving (except for the part where the book wasn’t finished nor sold) and

We actually can’t say what our fascination with self-publishing is. But we do have a fascination. Let’s face it, getting published isn’t easy, and sometiems, you have to take risks. Now, we’ve read a lot of bad self-published books, and, to be blunt, we’ve read a lot of really bad self-published books. But there is ample evidence that there is plenty of good writing not noticed by the big publishers. And with that, we bring you another self-publishing success story. If you want something doing … Mark Blayney’s self-published novel has won a Somerset Maugham prize for young authors. He

Sometimes we sit and ponder articles for a few days before commenting (seriously, that’s why we have the world’s largest collection of links to articles on literary reviews — we’re sure we’re going to pull it all together into something brilliant). This article, from the Los Angeles Times, was a thinker. On first read, we said, “Yeah, that’s true.” Then we thought, “But it’s part of them.” This is not wishy-washy thought; we’re not sure that “A” can be separated from “B”. We tried to think of so-called minority writers (so-called because if you spend more than five minutes on

When we were much younger, a child author by the name of Alexandra (Ally) Sheedy published a book called She Was Nice to Mice. We specifically recall the title, not because the author went on to another public career, but because back then, our little skeptical brain caught a whiff of nepotism. Something about a relative in the publishing biz. Alas, we can’t find anything to support our vague memories, but we’re sure we’re right. If not about that, then something else. And we stand by our wise decision not to publish our first book — a rambling tale filled