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RB: What about the aspirations of the students in the literary programs? Why do they want to get into something that at best means worrying about the decisions that you were talking about?

DA: They don't expect to make a killing. Some do. One of the first things is I say, "Get a decent day job that won't eat you alive. If you think you are going to make a decent living as a writer, ask yourself, why I am here teaching you?" I make a fair to decent amount of money off my books but not enough to live on. If you want to write literary novels you better love the field and you better have something in mind that you want to accomplish that isn't about a large bank account or a 401k. It ain't happening. The thing that makes me angry and really complicates it—it is in some ways almost a vow of poverty to write literary novels that ignore the marketplace element. I find that to be tragic. It was shocking to me when I went to teach in Italy—and I've taught in France and been to visit in England, outside this country the approach to literature is remarkably different. Most countries have a system by which literary writers can at least live and write. In this country it is entirely shaped by the marketplace and, most of the literary writers I know teach. Some of them are good teachers, but a lot of them are not. But they have to make a living. It does have an impact on our literature.

// posted by Cupcake @ 3:06 PM |

A weekly introduction, starting next week, to a writer who won't necessarily have a book out that is available to buy, but whose work is interesting. This intro will include an interview with the writer (that I will either conduct or link to) and an excerpt from their work (that I may have to translate).

A weekly giveaway. But don't get too excited: some weeks the giveaway will be a copy of that weird comic Whataburger (pronounced WATER-burger, in case you don't live in Texas) puts in their kid's meals.

A weekly post about/excerpt of/link to an old-ish, relevent book, story, article, or poem that is meant to inspire.

A weekly post/rant/series of rants about random literary news and goings-on, especially if they include free beer.

A weekly "New Releases" post that will not include any of the books on the NYT's lame-ass New Releases list.

Now, in addition to being ambitious I am also highly undisciplined, so, there is a chance that all I will do is the weekly giveaway-- because I have a primal and crazy-loud-as-an-acrylic-fuschia-nails-wearing-bronx-grandma need to give/ be loved.

// posted by Cupcake @ 2:28 PM |

Even against the obvious backdrop of chaos in the world, she still believes fervently in the importance of fiction, refusing to concede that it has been outrun by reality or the ever-spinning news cycle. “The need to understand things that happen right in front of us is no less than it ever was,” she says. “And the capacity of human beings to understand and make sense of things that happen far away is even more pressing than it was because we get the information, which doesn’t mean we have the insight or the understanding. All of which is an argument for first-rate journalism, which I am prepared to say is one of the tremendous needs of our society, like clean water. But the fact that we have a tremendous need for informed and intelligent reporting doesn’t mean that we no longer have a need for informed and informative and insightful and provocative fiction. Do we have to say, ‘Oh, we need trees but not rivers?’

A friend of mine finds out from her agent (her editor never calls) that her book, her fourth, has been dropped from her publisher’s catalogue. The work is too difficult. A writer I know is told, “How about putting in some dogs? People love it when you write about dogs.” An editor I admire, at a magazine I have long admired, says, “We’re just not doing emotionally complex work.”

All I wanted to do in this issue was to find room for difficult work, for emotionally complex work, for work that didn’t have dogs where they didn’t belong and for work that loved the word, as well as the story, and believed in telling a story that mattered, in a way that stayed with me, stayed with you, and didn’t shy from imagination or get coy about facts.

// posted by Cupcake @ 2:13 PM |

[Ed.--Three issues ago, they explained email as "a message, written traditional letter format, but electronically transmitted via the World Wide Web, an interconnected and decentralized public network." ... Oh, alright. Not really. I made that up.]

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:57 PM |

We recommend that you begin by researching literary magazines. This is the market within which most writers start their careers and gain recognition from editors, agents, and other writers...

...In general, major publishing houses do not accept unsolicited poetry manuscripts and rarely look at unagented or unsolicited fiction. Editors at major houses are more interested in writers who have already published a book or writers whose work has already appeared in large-circulation trade magazines such as The New Yorker or Harper’s.

// posted by Cupcake @ 3:09 PM |

So, OK, we understand that maybe you don't want to dress up like Madame Curie, or Amelia Bloomer, or even Lizzie Borden. But why should this mean that the most prominent liberated-woman costume on display is that of an 80-year-old stereotype, the flapper? Sadly, this fringed disguise hangs next to kits meant to turn you into a sniveling post-war bobby soxer or a hysterically conformist poodle-skirted co-ed, neither or whom were exactly icons of feminism.

Even outfits that might bespeak strength and power are frequently compromised by an undercurrent of sexual subjugation. So though there is no lack of firefighter uniforms for men, the female version is called Fire Fox. (Could she be the New York Post's famous firehouse nympho?) Likewise, the woman police officer is known as Officer McNaughty.

Though there are bountiful offerings for men of medicine, including a blood- soaked Dr. Kill Joy and a foaming mad scientist, Nurse Feelbetter is all-girl. (In fairness, there is a white coat inscribed Dr. Ophelia Cummings, sex therapist, M.D.) But there is one institution that is definitely female-friendly: the insane asylum, where the voluptuous inmate suffers in a vinyl shorts-and-chains combo.

Could restrictive career choices have led to this stint in the loony bin?

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:54 PM |

For this anthology, Kelso has assembled an all-star lineup of women cartoonists—almost all under 35 years old—and given them the mandate to show what they can do. The result is a dizzying variety of work, most of it impressive and some superb. Andrice Arp takes on the "Scheherazade" theme most literally, adapting a tale from The 1001 Nights that nests stories within stories, and reflecting its structure in her page compositions. Ariel Bordeaux contributes a wordless story whose panels appear between everyone else's pieces. Some of the stories are solemn, like Leela Corman's "Fanya Needs to Know," a chapter from her graphic novel-in-progress about an abortionist in early 20th-century Jewish New York; others are cute and whimsical, like Sara Varon's adorable untitled piece about a dog that builds a robot. There are cartoonists who draw on fine art (e.g., Vanessa Davis, whose "I Wonder Where the Yellow Went" is a series of her fluid autobiographical sketches) and on prose literature (e.g., Gabrielle Bell, who adapts a Kate Chopin story as "One Afternoon"). Kelso's own contribution, "The Pickle Fork," is one of the book's highlights, a dark but loopy narrative, drawn with clean-lined elegance, about a museum of silverware and the people who have to polish it.

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:01 PM |

When I was drafting my new novel this spring, it all went pretty smoothly in the grand scheme of things but it still felt like very hard work--the image in my head for what I was doing was cutting a usable path through a sugar-cane field with an extremely blunt machete.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:50 AM |

To me, David Byrne is comforting. His voice is my madeleine and tea; I can hear a part of my past in it. That’s why I cannot believe I’m in Edinburgh, pogo-ing a few feet away from him, the big suit guy I pogo-ed to 10 years ago with my brother in a small Midwest town. I also cannot believe what a blast thirtysomethings in tapered jeans are! They get down like nobody’s business! If I could, I would buy them all a round of tonics.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:35 AM |

Every self-respecting tribe has its fertility dance and, in the literary world, this takes place around the temple of annual book prizes. When the oracle speaks, authors are rewarded for years of lonely creativity, their novels lifted from semi-obscurity, their life stories revisited, their ever-fragile egos bolstered and, more crucially, sales of their books are magically multiplied.

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:23 PM |

TELL MTV: RUN EMINEM'S VIDEO

Even if you don’t like hip-hop--or if you don’t agree with everything it depicts--Eminem’s new video, “Mosh," is important. It’s animated, but no less stinging for that. It depicts a mother coming home with an eviction notice and seeing a report on Bush’s tax cuts for the rich on television; a soldier returning home to his wife and baby, only to be re-deployed to Iraq; and, at the end, an army of white and black people voting. (Links to Mac-friendly video here). Among the lyrics:

Someone’s trying to tell us something, maybe this is God just saying
We’re responsible for this monster, this coward, that we have empowered
...
Let the President answer our high anarchy
Strap him with an AK-47, let him go
Fight his own war, let him impress daddy that way


Musicians making political statements is nothing new. But there aren’t many recording artists with as wide a following among young people across the country; and fewer still would be willing to risk alienating fans with a video assaulting a candidate this directly, right before an election. And not only is the video unusual, it’s powerful.

Per Kos, you can write-in a vote for the video on MTVs Total Request Live and on their hip-hop request show. On either page, scroll to the bottom, click “Other”, and enter Eminem for artist and “Mosh” for song title. Vote as often as you please.

// posted by Cupcake @ 11:57 AM |

What would Ayn Rand say about Dear Prince Charming? (Which I am sure is a wonderful read). Would Virginia Woolf thumb through What a Girl Wants while sipping her afternoon tea? What could the illustrious writers of the past and the budding present day authors say about a genre of literature that celebrates a women’s independence by revoking it on the very next page.

// posted by Cupcake @ 11:50 PM |

In truth, I would much rather vote for Leonard Peltier, who runs for the Peace and Freedom Party. Ideally, we should have more than a two party system. Can you call freedom the choice between two masters? We don't live in a free country, and right now we are far from peace. The Peace and Freedom Party is exactly what we need. Unfortunately, I can't risk the chance of Bush winning just to satisfy my hope of what America could be. It's only a few days now, just after Halloween. I love that mystical holiday, when the veil between worlds is the thinnest. If the spirits could vote, I bet they'd all choose Leonard Peltier. He is definitely the most soulful candidate.

// posted by Cupcake @ 9:32 AM |

PISTIL Magazine is a national, independent, Chicago-based publication that showcases groundbreaking talent. With a focus on community, diversity & activism, our content combines high-concept fashion with progressive feminism. Each quarterly, themed issue features five "Groundbreaking Women" making significant strides in their given fields. In addition, the women and men of PISTIL foster activism in the arts through a series of sponsored community awareness events.

// posted by Cupcake @ 8:43 PM |

“And what do we do?” asks foundation director Harold Augenbraum. “We end up with a parochial lineup. Who would expect that all five would be women from New York?”

// posted by Cupcake @ 5:44 PM |

[Q:] It seems that all my friends who write have been stymied of late. One sank all the proceeds of his advance into promotion, then found he would not even get a PW review. Another has been told that the publisher wants yet another book “like” his first three. I observe my own so-called “career” as moving in this direction: I managed to get a good agent and a top literary publisher. I didn’t manage to be “lead” book. There’s no “push,” no way for the books to become visible, even when they get good reviews here and there in this great big country. Seven books on, I’m wondering what to do. What practical advice can you give a mid-list writer who has never gotten any push? Is there anything he can do? It seems to me that a writer can drive himself crazy attempting to make up for what a publisher doesn’t do–and never make a dent.

[A:] Publishers take what works for them and try to replicate it ad infinitum, so it’s not surprising to hear your publisher wants more of the same from you. Actually, it would seem to say that you are indeed a successful author if you’ve published seven books. But with over 150,000 books published last year in the US, it is a challenge, to say the least, to get any one book much attention, and clearly only a very few can be “lead” books. So what then? Be creative. That’s both the lamest and best advice I can give. Start a Web site, have a contest, streak at Wimbledon, buy a billboard, self-publish. There’s no easy answer. The one piece of practical advice I always give an author is to hire an outside publicist if he or she can afford it, because the publisher will only be able to afford to do so much in most cases.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:04 PM |

Interviewer: For a long time it was primarily men who wrote and published & there were the "scribbling women."

Walbert: That's interesting. I never thought of it that way. I mean it's interesting to think that maybe the fact that there are many more writing programs and many more writing courses, that they might give women the permission to write. I agree that the myth of the writer as having to step off the whale boat, or come from some great adventure, or be knighted by some higher power, is one that probably has allowed men to enter the profession in great hordes and women to be left behind. I think that women are read differently than men are. In my mind that's the greatest barrier right now, not that there are not women who are writing and writing extremely well and worthy of recognition, but that there are systems that are in place that prevent women from being read the way they should be read.

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:36 PM |

Chick lit continues to find new fans. Harlequin Books, best known for its old-fashioned bodice-rippers, has found success with its trendy Red Dress imprint, and is now going after an overlooked segment of women with what senior editor Joan Marlow Golan calls "Christian chick lit." While these novels - which begin hitting shelves in October - will be carefully tailored (there will be "no booty calls," she notes), the heroines will still be young, single and sassy: "Christian girls wanna have fun, too," Golan says.

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:34 PM |

PRIZE FIGHT

The host of a dinner party on Fifth Avenue not long ago, greeted guests with a question: “Can you tell me how clichés subjugate people?” The occasion for this puzzler was that afternoon’s announcement of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded to little-known Austrian writer named Elfriede Jelinek. Jelinek, according to the Nobel citation, had won “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” Pardon us?

Rumors began circulating that even Morgan Entrekin, the head of Grove/Atlantic, which has published Jelinek, didn’t know who she was when people stopped to congratulate him at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Not true: “I’d heard of Jelinek,” Entrekin said last week. “But I had not read Jelinek.” Anyway, Entrekin had already moved on to a newer topic of literary-prize chatter—the National Book Awards, whose finalists were announced last Wednesday. “I haven’t read one of those books,” Entrekin said, of the five fiction candidates. “I’m sure they were all worthy in their own way. But I had only heard of one of them.”

Consider some of the writers who were eligible this year: Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick. And the nominees are: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Christine Schutt, Joan Silber, Lily Tuck, and Kate Walbert. All of the authors are women, and each lives here in New York City. According to the Times, only one book has sold even two thousand copies.

“I’m sort of astounded at this list,” the novelist Thomas McGuane said last week. “It’s got a provincial tone—five women from New York? Maybe it should be called the Municipal Book Awards.” [Will somebody please do a count of how many times it has been five men from New York? Did anyone call it "Municipal" then?--Eliz.]

McGuane, who was a finalist for the award in 1973, for his novel “Ninety-two in the Shade,” is no stranger to the selection process. He chaired the fiction committee in 1995—the last time, incidentally, that Roth won, for “Sabbath’s Theater.” “The judges range from cynical to earnest,” McGuane explained, noting that, with hundreds of books to choose from, the task is, on its face, impossible. “You have some judges who just read forty-three words and give up.” (Michael Kinsley, one of 2002’s nonfiction judges, caused a minor furor when he admitted that “you must put aside any fuddy-duddy notion of not judging a book by its cover, or at least by its title.”) “Generally, the winner is three people’s second-favorite book,” McGuane said.

Stewart O’Nan, one of this year’s fiction judges (and a decidedly earnest one), doesn’t see what the fuss is about. “This is just five really good books,” he said. “There were a lot of books this year written by writers with large reputations, but it’s not a popularity contest. I think we’re all happy.” He went on, “If I were handicapping I’d give all five an even, twenty-per-cent shot.” [Stewart O'Nan: please come read at Cupcake's Men We Love night happening sometime in 2005. Thank you. --Eliz.]

Historically, all the judges do not end up happy. Antonya Nelson, who chaired last year’s fiction committee, said that she’d received an e-mail from Rick Moody, this year’s chairman, asking for advice. “My only advice was that they ought to commit to being agreeable with one another,” she said. She recalled a cocktail-party conversation with another former judge. “The committee he’d been overseeing had been acrimonious,” she said. “He sincerely felt that the book they’d chosen was a real compromise.” So she told her panel, “I don’t want to be at a cocktail party in the future bad-mouthing any of you.” (They chose Shirley Hazzard’s “The Great Fire.”)

McGuane’s committee was notably contentious and didn’t decide to give Roth the prize until an hour before dinner was served at the awards banquet. “I loved ‘Sabbath’s Theater,’” he said. “But not everybody agreed with me. In fact, I’m confident that at least somebody on my committee was disgusted by the experience and sorry to be associated with the prize.”

Whatever the case, the judges seem to be working from a murky set of guidelines. “We were charged with finding something that’s enduring,” Nelson recalled. “So we inclined ourselves toward the bigger palette, the historical sweep.”

O’Nan said that he has read “The Plot Against America,” Roth’s new book, which, arguably, has been the year’s most celebrated literary release. “I think it’s a wonderful reworking of history that he tries to then fulfill. And it works for a while, but then he realizes he’s painted himself into a corner he can’t get out of, and he throws his hands up and says, ‘Oh, help!’” He added, “It’s a good try.”

Roth ranks higher on O’Nan’s list than Tom Wolfe, however, whose novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” is due out next month. “Ay-yi-yi, John Irving was right: the guy’s not a novelist,” O’Nan said. “It’s nice that he thinks he’s the new Dickens, but he’s just not. Wow! What are you gonna do?”

McGuane, for his part, thinks there’s not much you can do, given that the awards are inherently anti-democratic. “When I see an institution like this one apparently tanking, I’m not all that sorry, because there’s just no way to make it viable,” he said. “My first thought was, Well, this was the meltdown we were promised.”

— Ben McGrath

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:08 PM |

Only in America could Mr. O'Reilly appear on "Live With Regis and Kelly" to plug his new moralistic children's advice book (sample dictum: "Healthy sex is a combination of sensible behavior and sincere affection") just as old and young alike were going online to search thesmokinggun.com for the lewd monologues attributed to him in Ms. Mackris's 22-page complaint.

// posted by Cupcake @ 11:56 AM |

"There are a lot of Latinos who want to write a book, and they don't even know where to start," said Sobeida Cruz, the 100 Hispanic Women group's local president and the organizer of yesterday's event at Manhattanville College. "I'm hoping if they hear Latina writers here, they will say, 'Hey, we can also do that.'

Michelle Herrera Mulligan, said, "It's not just getting published, it's getting supported."

Mulligan urged Latina readers to search out Latino-themed books, like "Border-Line Personalities," a collection of memoirs by young bicultural Latinas she edited with Robyn Moreno.

"If we don't tell our own stories," said Quintero, "someone else will, and they will misrepresent us."

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:34 PM |

If you could change one thing about New York, what would it be?

Lower rent. Add more sexy men. Raise salaries. Make opportunities to eat private, complimentary, buffet style food. And I don�t mean buffet-style like a bunch of shitty hotel food, I mean this decadent smorgasbord of all my favorite foods. It would have chocolate fondue and oysters and great salads and tart pies, and tart lemon cake and lots of appetizers and seafood and pasta. And cheese/fruit plates. As well as an olive bar. Also ice cream sundaes with fudge and almonds, dim sum and sushi (+ grilled shrimp with garlic and butter). Drinkwise it will have: cranberry Calistoga, vitamin water, coke, wine, saki, margaritas, and more.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:21 PM |

What is your writing process like?

I don't have a schedule. I'm always amazed at writers who need to light a candle or something. I like to write on the train. Sometimes I like to write at night. Whenever I'm alone and the house is silent. I need to know that I have the time to write, that I have the whole day. That's probably also why I work best at night, because I know that I don't have to go anywhere at 3:00 in the morning, or take care of my nephew, or cook for anybody.

How important is silence in your writing?

The kind of literature I love has a lot of silence. The power of the things left unsaid. I think really Purple Hibiscus is about Kambili finding her voice.

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:30 PM |

Were it not for the company I was keeping, the whole experience would have made me feel existentially glum, especially when the DJ started asking (screaming) who, in the audience, was fucked up and drunk. Satisfied with the percentage of respondents who were affirmative, Disco D proceeded to play a bunch of tracks that promised "women are ho's" and having sex with a woman who has fake tits is OK, as long as they feel all right. As DD dug deeper into his set, pausing only to assure us he had been provided with "the shittiest mixer in history," it seemed like his every musical cue had the following subtext: I AM NOT GOING TO LEAVE HERE UNTIL I TURN ONE OF YOU FELLAS INTO A RAPIST.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:46 PM |

Subject: She Stops Shopping to Conquer - October 19, 2004

If women shut their purses and didn't shop for a day, would the economy suffer? The idea gets tested on Oct. 19 by 85 Broads, a networking group founded in 1999 by Janet Hanson, who worked for Goldman Sachs-headquartered at 85 Broad St.

Business Week has learned that 85 Broads is asking its 4,000-plus members in 450 companies, colleges, and B-schools not to spend that day.

Hanson says the "buycott" will show the gap between women's purchasing power and their underrepresentation in boardrooms and executive suites.

Members plan to spread the word to friends and to women on college campuses. Women control $3.3 trillion in yearly consumer spending, 44% of national spending- a sum that isn't just symbolic. According to Business Week, the U..S. economy has become increasingly female-driven...

Did you know that women in the U.S.:
1) Control $3.3 TRILLION in annual consumer spending?
2) Make 62% of all car purchases?
3) Take more than 50% of all business trips?
4) Control over 50% of the personal wealth in this country?

UNFORTUNATELY, WOMEN'S PURCHASING POWER STILL HASN'T TRANSLATED INTO ECONOMIC POWER.

According to Catalyst, only 6 CEO's in the Fortune 500 are women, 12.4% are board directors, and 5.2% are among the top earners in the country.

On TUESDAY, OCTOBER 19th, we invite you to leave your checkbook and credit cards at home as a symbolic gesture that we no longer "buy" the glacial pace of change for working women in America. Instead of shopping, go for a walk in the park, write a letter to a friend, enjoy a museum, or help someone in need.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:22 PM |

Rober Birnbaum: ...One thing that struck me as I finished The Little Friend is how you [the writer] knew it was finished? How did you know when you wanted to end the book?

DT: I knew it from the very beginning. This is very much the book I set out to write when I set out ten years ago. This is how I envisioned it. I wanted it to end in a fairly uncertain place. I didn't want to tie things up too neatly. I don't think it's really the business of a writer today, to tie up narrative too neatly and deliver it in a box. And to lead the killer away in handcuffs. Do you know what I am saying? It's too much about television and movies and it's too much a kind of narrative that we are inundated with. It's a writer's business now, to work at the edges of narrative and different kinds of experience, which is just as legitimate but not as stylized and ritualized as the kinds of things we all have been used to for many, many years.

It's impossible to be a novelist in the 21st century and not be influenced by media—by film—we are creatures with enormous visual cortexes. For us seeing is believing. We have become so visually sophisticated. Everyone is visually sophisticated because of television; because of advertising we are inundated with images.

RB: Are you suggesting that many novels have become more like visual media than like old-fashioned stories?

DT: No, not quite. It's impossible to be a novelist in the 21st century and not be influenced by media—by film—we are creatures with enormous visual cortexes. For us seeing is believing. We have become so visually sophisticated. Everyone is visually sophisticated because of television; because of advertising we are inundated with images. This has been going on since the early part of the 20th century. There is no one alive today in this culture that really hasn't been inundated by images. That necessarily colors writing, not necessarily in a bad way. A writer like Vladmir Nabokov is influenced by film and he talks about it. He uses visual puns in his work very often. And then you have a writer like Jane Austen who very seldom describes what a character looks like. We don't really know what they look like. "A nice well formed gentleman of twenty-four…", the descriptions are very vague. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a different thing. Our enormous visual sophistication as a people and as a culture has infiltrated us in every way not just in the writing of novels and the reading of novels. So, no, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:45 PM |

I am starting to hate this book. So here is the deal with Instant Love. Through Hilarious Hijinks TM with the printer, I now have double the print order. What does this mean for me? I get to fold and staple an additional 100 copies. What does it mean for you? I'm halving the cost of the adorable little book with very dirty art. So $7 gets you two books, and if you really insist, $4 gets you one book. But I am hoping that you'll buy two books, one for you, one for the one you love. So please buy one (or two) now. Or let me know if you want to trade.

A little bit about the book:
The short story is called "Spare Change" and it takes place in Seattle. Daniel's art work is awesome. I didn't realize how dirty it was until I was at the printer last night, and they were like, that's naughty. It's a bunch of pictures of naked ladies. If you like naked ladies, this is the book for you, even though my story is not about naked ladies at all, though there are ladies in it. And even though I hate this book because there were so many problems making it (it had to be laid out twice, the first printer was mean, the second printer was really nice but made too many, I kept forgetting to bring artwork to work or to the printer and I generally was an idiot throughout the entire process), now of course I love it madly, because it is done, it is sweet, and as always with the Instant Love collection, it fits very nicely in your pocket.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:59 PM |

The characters were — to borrow a phrase from Sykes herself — absolutely "beyond" and not in a good way. The writing was done, I believe, on scraps of napkins from Starbucks and tickets from dry cleaners on the Upper East Side.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:12 AM |

IF NIGELLA LAWSON did not exist it would be necessary for someone - India Knight, say, or Marian Keyes - to invent her. Her life story has all the ingredients of a chick-lit bestseller: celebrity, beauty, tragedy, politics, food, wealth, marriage to a restless and elusive art dealer - and a hint of fetishistic sex.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:05 AM |

The list of fiction finalists consisted of five female authors, all living in New York City, and included two first-time novelists, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, for "Madeleine Is Sleeping" (Harcourt), and Christine Schutt, for "Florida" (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press). This is the first time the fiction short list has not included any men.

// posted by Cupcake @ 5:44 PM |

These travel writings tended to reflect more about the domestic habits in foreign lands than they did about the actual locales. They were less about adventure and more about the fragmented details of daily, human life. It may seem a bit of a stretch -- and a leap through centuries -- to compare these early feminist travel writers to Susan Orlean, whose book My Kind of Place is described as a collection of travel pieces. But Orlean's book, like Wollstonecraft's and Sand's, is not about conventional travel.

It does tell you something about place, but it tells more about the ordinary people who inhabit that place and the ethos that governs their lives. It certainly isn't about the orthodox concerns of most travelers, the great hotels and lavish dinners. At one point Orlean finds herself sleeping on a hard bunk in a hut on Mt. Fuji after a dinner of plain boiled rice. What Orlean does, in the fashion of her 18th and 19th century forebears, is to explore the domestic at home and abroad: the sandlots where Cuban boys play baseball, an independently owned supermarket in Queens, a trailer park just outside of Portland, Ore.

// posted by Cupcake @ 3:10 PM |

What connects O'Keeffe with Kahlo, Modigliani and Dalí is that they were all unwilling to allow a style to take on a life of its own. In the work of these artists style remained a private matter, and the public flocked to their work precisely because it seemed the revelation of a secret -- a kind of visual arts exposé. For Dalí there was nothing but the preternatural weirdness of his dreams. For Modigliani the whole world was a succession of bohemian Everymen and Everywomen. For Kahlo life was as intricately tangled as the figures on an antique Mexican votive painting. For O'Keeffe all experience was a cycle of blossoming forth and withering away. And for the public these signature styles became like an actor's beloved mannerisms -- like Clark Gable's swaggering toughness or Marlene Dietrich's suave seduction.

// posted by Cupcake @ 2:17 PM |

I told all of my clients and friends to come to my shop and we had six brave souls venture to the first meeting. I told the group that we were going to read a book a month, meet on the second Tuesday evening of each month and we would all wear tiaras. They looked at me like deer caught in headlights! I kept plying them more wine, cheese, and crackers and continued announcing that our motto was going to be “where tiaras are mandatory and reading good books is the RULE!”

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:35 PM |

Mr. Michaels said that while he knew the decision to create a two-woman team would probably be seen as admirable, he emphasized that he and Ms. Fey had only comic chemistry, not equal opportunity, in mind as they chose a new anchor.

"It has to work because it's funny. No one's going to say, 'I admire the choice, therefore I'm going to watch it.' "

Mr. Michaels chose Ms. Fey to be an "Update" anchor four years ago, when she was head writer, a decision that he described as "kind of risky at the time" but that has been well received by critics.

// posted by Cupcake @ 2:25 PM |

There are a lot of amazing series out there. I can never get to Little Grey Book Lectures because it’s on the same night as Happy Ending, but John Hodgman is enormously talented. KGB obviously has consistently good people. Cupcake promotes strong female voices; One Story devotes their nights to one author, Sunday at Sunny’s and Barbes are also pretty special. There’s a lot going on.

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:26 PM |

O'Neal's mother, actress Joanna Moore, was no prize, either. She popped pills and was obsessed with looking young. "The caps on her teeth were never tight enough," O'Neal writes. "As a child, I was like the tooth fairy, ferreting out the lost caps that were always strewn around the house."

// posted by Cupcake @ 9:53 AM |

The riskiest thing I've ever written is usually the thing I just finished or the thing I'm in the middle of. I really believe that working with risky material can be a main line to the energy at the core of a writer. When working with material that is hard to write or that makes me feel vulnerable, I sometimes write the hardest line/scene/image first. I write it as fast as I can, and as raw as it needs to be. That way, I can stop dreading it, and I can also get a good look at the thing. I also use this method to bring myself into contact with new material. I write the rawest thing I can, or something that makes me uneasy, and I try to understand what story it may be leading to. Sometimes I have to live with a particular line or image for a long time before I can write the surrounding material.

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:10 PM |

According to the fair's underlying chatter, freshly nudged into the literary dustbin are a couple of once-thriving genres: the kind of narrative non-fiction exemplified by such titanic successes as Longitude and Fermat's Last Theorem, and all but the most solidly established chick-lit. The former, witheringly sent up by an agent I meet as 'things like The History Of The Potato and The Man Who Invented The Diving Helmet,' apparently represents an archetypal case of an exhausted market; as far as the latter is concerned, Jenny Colgan and Jane Green may soon be the only novelists left standing.

In their place is a raft of more voguish categories. According to Ed Jaspers, an agent whose company, Conville & Walsh, is selling the yet-unwritten by already-notorious Intimate Adventures Of A London Call Girl (mysteriously credited to Belle Du Jour, and initially and erroneously traced to Toby 'How to Lose Friends' Young), the British are beginning to lose their stereotypical habit of putting most literature about sex in the box reserved for 'mucky books'; as the success of the French memoir The Sexual Life Of Catherine M proves, we may be embracing a slightly more continental sense of sophistication.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:45 PM |

This trend isn't just about being sexy, either. T-shirts also announce the promiscuity of the wearer, often promising convenient unfaithfulness for the viewer, as in 'Tonight I'm Single', and 'My Boyfriend is Out of the Country'. I particularly dislike the last for its implication that any questions about your availability have to be referred to your present licensee, as it were; and also that while your current partner is away you will naturally be doing your duty as a woman by servicing some other member of the male population. After all, what else could keep you appropriately busy and entertained? Extending this logic, it's surely only a matter of time before T-shirts proclaiming 'I Do It With Dogs', or 'Buy Me a Drink and I'll Give You a Blow Job in the Back of Your Vauxhall Nova' appear in Top Shop.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:18 PM |

Tuesday, October 12th @ 7:00 pm--Stanford, CA
Reading with Imad Rahman
Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg 460)
Stanford University
Registration appreciated but not required
FREE
For more information, visit Stanford University Events

Friday, October 15th--Oregon City, OR
*details to come—please check website
website
Clackamas Community College
19600 South Molalla Avenue
Oregon City, Oregon 97045

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:21 PM |

To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsiously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy.

To write is to sit and stare, hypnotised, at the reflection of the window in the silver ink-stand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and laden with treasures that one unloads slowly on to the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp.

To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometime's one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it -- and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.

To write is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed nib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective...the attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:15 AM |

"I lived in America for six years. Let's just say a personal relationship took me out there." What she will say is that being a woman in the US, specifically in southern and middle America, reminded her of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. She often felt that she had to conform, to hold her tongue -and, unsurprisingly, didn't find it easy.

// posted by Cupcake @ 11:40 PM |

I'm talking 'bout 24
I'm talking 'bout 7, too
That's not my theory, baby
That's the truth

// posted by Cupcake @ 11:20 PM |

You were saying that there aren't a lot of places for short fiction, but there are a lot of journals out there.

Well, there are a lot of people out there doing really good stuff. There are a lot of new places, too. But there aren't a lot that are consumer targeted... Their audience is really small. Like all the university ones are tiny. So there are a ton of them, but they only reach like 300 or 500 people. And the major magazines are publishing less and less fiction. Ten years ago all the women's magazines published fiction. The men's magazines still do, but the women's don't.

// posted by Cupcake @ 11:06 PM |

Her recent works are variations on one of her basic themes: the seemingly inability of women to fully find themselves, and live out their lives in a world where they are glossed over by and as stereotypes.

// posted by Cupcake @ 8:50 AM |

From October 12 through 16, however, female writers from across the African diaspora will come together to celebrate and dissect their own contributions to the discussion of globalization. Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Maryse Condé head an all-star cast of scholars, authors, and artists.

The event, co-sponsored by NYU's Institute of African American Affairs and Africana Studies Program and the Organization of Women Writers of Africa Inc. (OWWA), will discuss globalization from a female perspective, as well as the impact of dislocation, terrorism, and new technology on literature, publishing, and the creative process. The conference is open to the public, and will be available to participants nationally and internationally via webcast, proving that we truly do have the world at our fingertips.

// posted by Cupcake @ 1:17 PM |

"I write about women, and about sexual relationships between men and women," says Palestinian feminist novelist Sahra Khalita.

"At first, back in the 1980s, my work was attacked by the Leftists. But now the Palestinian's women's movement is stronger - those who called me a chauvinist and a man-hater have retreated."

Ms Khalita is one of more than 200 Arab writers who have come to this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, the publishing world's biggest annual event, to show the rich variety of Arab writing.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:57 PM |

One of the most influential statements of this theme was made by the Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana in a 1911 lecture titled “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy.” The lecture bequeathed to subsequent observers an indispensable term of analysis—“the genteel tradition”—to describe what was wrong with American art and expression. More than that, it offered a far-reaching diagnosis of a fault line in American culture. American intellectuals responded to Santayana’s critique with what one scholar has called “the rebellion against Victorianism,” a rebellion that would turn out to be one of the organizing principles of 20th-century intellectual activity, particularly in the realms of arts and One-half of the American mind,” he asserted, the part that was “not occupied intensely in practical affairs,” had remained “becalmed,” floating “gently in the backwater” of American life—prim, polite, refined, and irrelevant. Meanwhile, the other half of the mind—the part concerned with material innovation—“was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids,” surging ahead of the entire world “in invention and industry and social organization.

// posted by Cupcake @ 11:15 PM |

What has impelled my writing so far," says the Calcutta-born author Chitra Divakaruni, "is the desire to put women in the center of stories, to have their voices be the voices of interpretation, their eyes the ones that we see through. There just hasn't been enough of that in the world, if you look back at literary history."

// posted by Cupcake @ 10:48 PM |

"Writers don't get a lot of attention," said Johnson, choking back tears.

A writing professor at Bard College, Johnson said that a majority of literary prizes are awarded by white people. "The amazing thing about the Hurston/Wright award is it gives us the first chance to transcend that," he said in his acceptance speech. "It's the only way we're ever going to be able to choose our own heroes."

...Foundation President Marita Golden said, "There's always a need for a community of people to recognize its geniuses and creative artists."

// posted by Cupcake @ 2:50 PM |

"Star People isn't sure which is more surprising: The fact that party girl Paris Hilton is now an author, or the fact that her memoir, Confessions of an Heiress, will debut at No. 7 on The New York Times bestseller list for the week of Sept. 26...

"She's debased herself enough to be rewarded on the best-seller list," New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus told Star People. "No one ever said the best-seller list is like being short-listed for the Nobel Prize. It's no literary distinction. Which isn't to say her book is a literary masterpiece."

British publishing columnist Robert McCrum recently argued that the promotion of terrible books is immaterial in the long run. Twenty or thirty years on, McCrum said, the standout literary works of our time will be remembered and forgettable ones like Pamela Anderson’s Star will have fizzled completely...

Yet even if we accept that the worst books will not last, there is no evidence that the converse is true. No one can guarantee that the very best literary novels will rise to the top of the historical consciousness when so little effort is made to publish and promote good fiction and so few people are reading it.

// posted by Cupcake @ 2:07 PM |

Now, for the 10th year, Jaffe is sharing a bit of her own best of everything - from her own pocket. Tomorrow evening, she'll award $10,000 each to six women at the beginnings of their writing careers. The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards, Jaffe says, are intended to help not-yet-established writers hire baby-sitters, travel, take a break from jobs or do whatever they need to write.

// posted by Cupcake @ 6:02 PM |

Created by Jasmine Trabelsi and Julia Laricheva, Artsy originated as a glossy publication/web site in the spring of 2001. The approach of featuring women's art from a contemporary feminist perspective quickly gathered fans.

Critics may say that there is no imbalance, or that the numbers of female artists are rising–so why the need for such a resource featuring just women artists?

* Until 1987, the textbook used in most American college and university art history courses listed no women artists.

* Presently, women artists comprise only 7 percent of all artists in textbooks used in the United States.

* Looking at the earnings of men and women painters in well-known galleries, work by men and women of comparable age &
  exhibition records show disparities in market value, similar to those we find in other fields where men & women compete.

By using a model of a collectively run publication, Artsy unites a variety of perspectives and voices targeting women artists at the start of their struggle to become recognized.

We aim to be a sustainable resource for women looking for a community where they can share support, inspiration & confidence.

// posted by Cupcake @ 5:32 PM |

Predictably enough, the press material that arrived with my galley heralded this volume as a daring and courageous inquiry into ''what many consider to be the last remaining taboo.'' Anal sex is very far from being the last remaining taboo, of course. (The last time I checked, cannibalism and necrophilia were still struggling for acceptance.) Indeed, there are some signs that the status of anal sex as any kind of taboo is under attack. State laws against sodomy were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003. And no less mainstream a fictional character than Bridget Jones cheerfully engaged in the practice, in the film adaptation of Helen Fielding's best-selling novel ''Bridget Jones's Diary.''

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:35 AM |

...a preview of coming attractions...
How chick lit is screwing over a generation.
Compare and contrast, novels written by men and written by women and how they are evaluated very differently by the reviewing elite.

// posted by Cupcake @ 12:30 AM |

The princess myth is a powerful drug, professing that life is a dust rag of misery until some prince Lippizaners along. Julie taught us that, changing from a nun with a dire haircut into a baroness cruising toward a recording contract. Of course, so did Jessica Simpson.

The fiction that every woman is waiting for a prince to save her is responsible for the multibillion-dollar wedding industry, the blinding bling market, the sad lies of "Joe Millionaire'' and "For Love or Money,'' as well as the late-stage interventions of "Queer Eye.'' It's also behind the tsunami in cosmetic surgery predicated on meeting that second or third prince - or preventing the original regent from decamping for a latter-day Anne Boleyn.

There is a boom industry of pale, pathetic Austen imitators, all goo and little bite, everything about engagement, nothing about a society we thought beyond such pressure. Entertainment Weekly, the Racing Form of popular culture, reviews pink-sheathed chick lit separately from other books, a nod that the stuff isn't literature at all but Cosmo without boob shots.

// posted by Cupcake @ 3:09 PM |

"Oh my goodness," Ms. Bentley said, with some exasperation. "Basically, feminism is a fantastic thing. Feminism made it possible for me to write this book and have it published, O.K.? That’s the bottom line. Within the scope of things, if feminism means pro-women in every way, I’m the ultimate. But I do not call myself a feminist necessarily. It’s not a label I use."

// posted by Cupcake @ 2:47 PM |