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The Kaminsky Cure

April 11, 2016

thekaminskycure

Well here I am at five and three-quarters

It’s Christmas 1939 in a little Austrian village that’s now part of Hitler’s Third Reich and I’m just beginning to notice things. Like what my brother and sisters are about and why my parents are often crying and my father usually shouting when he isn’t crying. I think it has something to do with the war we’re fighting, which according to the wireless is due to The International Jewish Conspiracy, whatever that is. But that’s not all. I don’t know it yet, but I was born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. [Read more…]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Austria, fiction, half-Aryan, holocaust, Luthern, Nazis, Third Reich, war fiction, World War II

Book Awards: The Best Reader Wins!

November 21, 2015

The winners of the National Book Awards were selected this week following an evening in which all the nominees participated in a reading hosted by New School.University.  Even though I have no idea whether or not the judges attended the readings, I couldn’t help noticing that the best readers — at least in poetry and fiction — ended up winning in their categories.   [Read more…]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Adam Johnson, Books, Charles Baxter, fiction, National Book Awards, poetry, prose, reading aloud, Sharon Olds, Word Theater

American Writers and the Booker Prize

October 18, 2015

I am one American writer who was disappointed when the Booker Prize decided to include works originally published in the U.S.A. I understand that this was a preemptive move to ensure that the Booker Prize, besides paying the most money of any major English-language prize, would hold onto its preeminence.  In my humble opinion, the prize always would have been preeminent due to the fact that the ceremony itself is televised and that a large percentage of the population in the UK actually watches the winner being announced.  This could never happen in the U.S.  There isn’t enough interest in such things, and even if there were, a televised literary ceremony would probably be preempted by some sporting event that would certainly draw down any potential audience.  Don’t get me wrong, Europeans watch sports as much as or more than we do; however, educated Europeans seem to have more time to devote to cultural awards or to the celebration of culture, itself.  In France, for example, a literary television show called Apostrophe was hugely popular until it went off the air, and any American published in French and whose French was good enough to be on the show, saw book sales spike in Oprah-like fashion.  Ask Paul Auster. [Read more…]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: American, Bob Marley, fiction, France, Hana Yanagihara, literature, Marlon James, minoroties, New York City, novelists, The Booker Prize, UK

Memoir Versus Novel

April 18, 2015

Bottoming Out Memoirs

 

Memoir Versus NovelI am not done weighing in about memoirs. While hiking on a neighbor’s land, it came to me that to create emotional resonance in a reader is a lot harder for a fiction-writer. Why?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: General Tagged With: autobiographical, bottoming out, dysfunctional, fiction, fiction-writing, imagination, James Frey, Memoir, memoirist, Nabokov, novelist, redemption, spiritual crisis, truth

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  • I KNOW WHAT YOU DID: On Writing The Blackmailer’s Guide to Love by Marian Thurm May 10, 2021
  • GULAGS, LAOGAIS, AND THE SUSPENSION OF BELIEF: thoughts after reading Amelia Pang’s Made in China by James L. May, author of The Body Outside the Kremlin April 22, 2021

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