A while back I posed a question about “literate genre fiction” to a list I belong to, specifically in the areas of mystery/suspense and scifi/speculative fiction and one of the people who responded said they “weren’t sure how literate they were, but the mystery stories of Dorothy Sayers sure are fun!” That’s a pretty accurate [...]

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David Foster Wallace has a new story in the New Yorker…

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I picked this up on a lark because I enjoy Nick Hornby’s writing so much. Too bad he only has one story in it! Speaking with the Angel is a collection of first-person stories by a kind of who’s who of young, hip writers (mostly from across the pond: Roddy Doyle, Colin Firth, Helen Fielding, [...]

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For the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time reading avant-garde writing. Post-avant poetry, the metafictionalists– I’ve been trying to get a handle on what’s happening “new and now.” Reading that work has elicited more than a few grimaces… though it makes me smile to recall Raymond Carver and the controversies of minimalism [...]

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Eric Rosenfield thinks the short story is dead and then points to a dissection of the Best American Short Stories as proof!? BAS hasn’t been representative of the most vital aspects of the short story for decades (if ever). It, like the Best American Poetry series, is representative of a very narrow, exceedingly mainstream slice [...]

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