AUTHORS: Do You Have What It Takes?
It’s the ultimate reality series, the ultimate game show and the ultimate half-hour of intriguing storylines. The Ultimate Author is an awesome television program packed with entertaining, engaging and interesting events. Each week, contestants go toe-to-toe in a writing competition that tests their ability to develop attention-grabbing content.
Casting Call: June 16, 2007. Fort Lauderdale, FL.
[via gawker.]
The Impatient Insist on the Dust Heap
Dan Green on John Barth: “These days Barth is most often criticized for failing to “move past” the metafictional game-playing for which he has become perhaps the emblematic figure. But where, exactly, is he to go? Toward some more conventional kind of narrative strategy? Presumably he determined long ago that this was not the direction in which his talents would take him or he would never have abandoned conventional techniques iin the first place.”
Needlessly Snarky (Due Possibly to Being Subjected to Fourteen Listens of “The 12 Days of Xmas” Over the Past 72 Hours) Roundup
- Ready Steady Book has a comprehensive Books of the Year 2005 symposium.
- Another year, another end-of-the-year panel, another set of pages that isn’t formatted properly for Firefox. But despite the usual platitudes from the usual people, Mr. Birnbaum maanages to offer a defense of Hitchens that many of his naysayers (including this blogger) might wish to consider.
- Question: Will the moralists now go after Chuck Palahniuk with the same vigor that they go after music, films, and video games? Come on, you fundies, you’ve got your smoking gun!
- First, Orhan Pamuk. Now Abdullah Yildiz. In Turkey, it’s all literary persecution, all the time! Note to the hypersensitive Turkish nationalists: Georgie Porgie only served you pudding and pie and kissed the girls and made them cry! Let the little fucker run away and learn to deal.
- Rodney Whitaker (aka Trevnian), author of the source material for the worst Clint Eastwood movie ever made, has passed on.
- Do crime writers get a bad rap?
- An interesting review of Park Honan’s Marlowe bio, wondering how much of biography is fiction.
- The playwright Gary Mitchell has received serious death threats and was attacked by men with baseball bats and gasoline bombs. Serious shit.
- Another million dollar debut deal. This time, for Diane Setterfield, a Yorkshire French teacher whose turned out a gothic novel in the vein of Jane Eyre, et al.
- Jack Anderson: last of a dying breed?
- Dan Green wonders why critics are picking on John Barth.
