Tuesday, April 26, 2005
New Yorker Fiction Taken to Task
This is a couple years old, but still relevant. John Warner wrote a great article -- Among the Unsavvy -- about the fiction selections at the New Yorker.
This failure is significant, because for an unknown short-story writer, the New Yorker is, literally, the lottery: an instant stroke with the power to change a life completely. Witness Nell Freudenberger, whose story ‘Lucky Girls’ was chosen for the 2001 debut fiction issue, and who was soon being offered a reported $500,000 for a short-story collection that had yet to be written. In a shrewd move, Freudenberger had the good sense to work at the New Yorker, thus bypassing that whole ugly unsolicited-manuscript business.
Also, from John Warner, Clueless in Academia:
Professors complain that each year’s batch of students are more clueless than the last, but could they be the ones in the dark? John Warner interviews author and academic Gerald Graff on who’s to blame for the failures in our classrooms.
posted by Anonymous at 8:40 PM