W.W. Norton will be publishing an anthology of hint fiction in the fall of 2010. And editor Robert Swartwood is looking for submissions — starting August 1.
What is hint fiction?
According to Swartwood: “a story of 25 words or less that suggests a larger, more complex story.”
Details and guidelines here.
“This is the worst house I’ve ever lived in!”
“I’m outta here!”
“Poopyhead isn’t a bad word, Daddy. It just means that you have poop on your head.”
Maria and I saw the Avett Brothers a few months ago — the first concert we’d been to since… well, I can’t even remember when.
Here they are performing at the desk of NPR’s All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen.
These guys are the real deal. They rock. They harmonize. They break your heart. They make you stomp your feet. They make you happy. They make you feel alive.
Today I spoke at a Young Writers Camp in Northern San Diego. I did it last year, and they asked me back again this year, so I guess I didn’t scare the kids too much.
What’s most interesting is the questions they ask (these are elementary school students, from first to fifth grade):
“What inspired you to write?”
“Is writing hard for you?”
“Where do you get your ideas?”
“Do you write children’s books?”
“What books did you read when you were growing up?”
“Do you make a lot of money from writing?”
(Yes, I laughed at that one.)
But my favorite today was this one:
“Are you well known?”
Uh, well, see kid, it’s complicated, there are like different levels and different types of success when you’re a writer. I mean, I don’t have a book published or anything yet, but I’ve published a lot of stories, and some people seem to like them, and I tried to publish this one novel with this one agent a few years ago and, well, long story short, it didn’t work out, because getting published is kinda hard and this long drawn out process and there’s also this thing called rejection, kid, don’t mean to scare you or anything here, but it’s true, and now I’m working on this other novel, see, and I have another agent who’s really great and encouraging and maybe this one will work out but I have to finish writing it first, so we’ll see…
Of course I didn’t say this. I yammered about something (can’t even remember), but I probably just should have said no. Either way, you could tell the kid was disappointed that I wasn’t Stephen King. I was disappointed I wasn’t Stephen King.
Last year the kids lined up in front of me after my talk and asked me for my autograph (one girl even had me sign her backpack). This year’s crowd, however, was a bit more subdued. No autographs. Though we did pose for a nice picture (I’ll post it here if I can get a copy) and they did laugh at 43 percent of my jokes.
Publishers Lunch reports that there’s a David Foster Wallace biography on the way:
“D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, about ‘why he matters and what he tried to teach us,’ to Paul Slovak at Viking, at auction, by Elyse Cheney at Elyse Cheney Agency.”
D.T. Max wrote the recent New Yorker article about Wallace. I thought the article was okay — earnest, comprehensive, etc. — but I also thought it was mostly “just the facts.” I didn’t get the deeper insights I was hoping for; I thought the earlier Rolling Stone article was more satisfying on that level (maybe that’s because the author of the RS piece had actually met Wallace and spent time with him, whereas Max never met Wallace).
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll still check it out.
UPDATE: So it looks like there were two DFW bio proposals circulating: one by Max, and another by David Lipsky, who wrote the above-mentioned RS article.
“The dueling book proposals were about as radically different in scope and intent as one could expect two biographies of the same guy to be. While Mr. Max, a former Observer reporter, aims to write a cradle-to-the-grave narrative about Wallace’s life and the historical-cultural backdrop against which he produced his work, Mr. Lipsky seems to have in mind something like a memoiristic sketch based almost entirely on a series of lengthy interviews he conducted with Wallace over the course of a week in 1996 for a Rolling Stone profile that ended up getting spiked.“
According to Viking, the Max biography will be “a relatively short book” that will come out “no earlier than 2011.”
UPDATE TO THE PREVIOUS UPDATE: Publishers Lunch reports (6/30) that the Lipsky book has sold as well. Brief NY Times report here.
