Hyperlinks From Around The Interwebs
A semi-regular roundup of stuff we like from the internets and youtubes:
-Dolly Freed has been blogging for Powells this week. If you ever wanted to know how to prepare that bird that kamikazeed into your window, now’s your chance.
-Poet Heather Christie is doing a live reading/Q&A tonight at htmlgiant. She won me over last time [...]
The Rumpus: One Year Later
In the last year, two literary websites have fought their way onto that “top sites” screen that pops up when I open a new window in Safari–The Rumpus and HTMLGIANT. Both have fantastic original content, links I’m generally thankful I’ve clicked on, worthwhile discussions in the comments threads, and a fierce devotion to independent literature. [...]
Dolly Freed, Blogger
Dolly Freed–who you might have seen here, or here, or here, or here–hadn’t been heard from for awhile (for the whole story, check out Paige Williams’ piece, “Finding Dolly Freed“). All that has changed. Dolly’s been kind enough to give up her dial-up connection and has begun blogging at her new website. I’ve included her [...]
Oprah and Vice, Respectively
What do these two magazines have in common? So far as I can tell…Nothing. Well, almost nothing. While their editorial positions on merkins may differ, they’re both enthusiastic about Dolly Freed’s Possum Living:
The Vice Interview
The O Magazine Review
Staff Picks, Best of the Decade: Literary Biographies
If you’re able to carve enough time out of your hectic holiday season for some lengthy reading, Nanci “Knuckles” McCloskey has, as a prelude to her best-of-the-decade list, composed a voluminous dialectic concerning the importance of the literary biography. The author deftly examines her compulsion toward the form, while acknowledging the enigma of how and why one [...]
Staff Picks, Best of the Decade: Stories Haunted by Creepy Little Girls
Nothing, absolutely nothing, has more capacity for creepiness than a little girl. Just a quick glance at that Diane Arbus photo will give me nightmares for weeks. Thankfully, Editor Meg Storey has come through with a list of stories that I should avoid reading at all cost–or at least attempt to block from my memory. [...]
The Green Movement’s Dark Side
“A Good Without Light” is an excerpt from Curtis White’s new book, The Barbaric Heart, and appears in the Hope/Dread issue of Tin House. White will be appearing at the third installment of our Disjecta reading/music series Saturday the 21st at 7 pm, along with the poet David Biespiel. Adrian Orange & the Child Slave [...]
Up and coming story writer Seth Fried made this after hearing we’ll be publishing a story of his in the Spring.
Expect more of this kind of thing from us in the future. Maybe even audio samples from “Bad Dudes” or “RBI:Baseball.”
Curtis White: A Good Without Light
Curtis White’s intelligence, colored by righteous indignation, is a slippery and protean thing. He’s tackled Liberalism and contemporary Art Culture and in his newest book, The Barbaric Heart, he examines the hidden ills of the environmental movement. We were fortunate enough to publish an excerpt of it in the “Dread” half of Issue #41, called [...]
CORY DOCTOROW: RADICAL PRESENTISM
Tin House #41 should be hitting your mailboxes or newsstand any day now. The dual theme is Hope/Dread (our designer, the fabulous Janet Parker, created stunning covers for each). In the dread corner, look for Nick Cave, Ander Monson, Alex Lemon, Matthea Harvey, and other doomsayers. Flying the colors of hope, we have Karen Russell, Abigail Thomas, Mahmoud Darwish, [...]
THE DISCIPLINED SOUL
The essays in The Story About the Story differ from traditional literary criticism in many ways. They contemplate rather than argue. They do not artificially sublimate subjectivity. They preserve mystery instead of dissecting it. And often they expand the scope of what they are willing to address so as to speak to the basics—the history, [...]
“KAFKA? I LOVE KAFKA. HE’S VERY – KAFKAESQUE.”
Anthologies are notorious for a number of reasons. The books have too many words on each page. They’re way too expensive because they’re intended as textbooks. And they’re never quite as comprehensive as they’re meant to be.
The Story About the Story is an attempt to correct all that.
One of the reasons anthologies prove problematic is [...]
Tenth Anniversary!
How appropriate is it that tin is the traditional metal used to commemorate a 10th Anniversary? I’ll tell you precisely how appropriate: very. From the first issue to the 40th, we’ve been lucky enough to publish some of our country’s finest writers, both established and emerging. And in order to celebrate our past good fortune [...]
Q&A with WE DID PORN’s Zak Smith
Zak Smith paints, writes, and performs in adult films. His new book is at the center of that venn diagram. The book is available now, both in paperback and limited-edition hardcover, and next month, it will be available in the UK from Beautiful Books. For those of you in Seattle, Zak will reading Sunday at [...]
Brief Interviews w/ Русская (Wo)men: Natalya Klyuchareva
It’s launch day for Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (You’ll see the little red “buy now” button in that right-hand corner…you should be able to handle it from there). To cap off our series of mini-conversations, Jeff Parker checked in with Natalya Klyuchareva, author of White Pioneers, a collection of poems, and Russia [...]
Genre Redux
The post I made last week, “To Genre or Not to Genre,” rankled a lot of readers. I have yet to decide whether this is a good thing.
It’s all given me a lot to consider. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in a position where my opinions have been held up for such wide [...]
Tin House Workshop 2009
Bear witness as we jactitate: The 7th Annual Tin House Summer Writers Workshop was an overwhelming success! Led by another stellar faculty, including Dorothy Allison, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, Anthony Doerr, Walter Kirn among many others, participants were treated to an intensely fruitful workshop experience, not to mention fascinating seminars and panels on beginnings, endings, [...]
10 Years of Tin House: Backstage Pass, By D.A. Powell
If Aimee Bender’s story a couple posts down wasn’t enough to make you run out and purchase a copy of our tenth-anniversary issue, you may be on the wrong site…allow me to hyperlink you to somewhere more appropriate. Still, for those of you who prefer brilliance in verse as opposed to prose, might we whet [...]
Excerpt: THE CHILDREN’S DAY
Michiel Heyns’ The Children’s Day is the second of our international series (you may have seen our first, When I Forgot, on the cover of the New York Times Book Review). We couldn’t be more excited to bring this novel to readers in the U.S. It’s a coming-of-age story set in apartheid South Africa, narrated [...]
