I know that this is very early, but we at S_ycamore Review_ are very excited to announce that Poet Laureate, Billy Collins will be judging our Wabash Prize in Poetry this fall. The deadline is October 17th and while we won't begin accepting submissions until August 1st, you might want to get a head start in polishing up those manuscripts.

I'd like to congratulate Matthew Simmons, whose story, "Saxophone Lung Explodes" was chosen by Richard Bausch as the winner of the this year's contest. There were many exceptional entries and as a staff, we had a very difficult time selecting the stories that we forwarded to Mr. Bausch. However, "Saxophone Lung Explodes" won the contest because of (in Mr. Bausch's words) "its exquisite strangeness and for its grief." Congratulations to Matthew Simmons and thank you to everyone who submitted to this years contest. You can read Matthew's story along with interviews with Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Michael Chabon, and novelist, Peter Ho Davies. If you'd like to purchase a copy, please write us and be sure to include a check for $7 made payable to Sycamore Review.

I'm certainly behind on this, but I just recently came across Toni Morrison's letter endorsing Obama.  As Ms. Morrison claims, this is a first for her.  You can read her letter here. 

Congratulations to Junot Diaz who has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The prizes were announced today.

Often, a writer is discouraged from writing a sex scene because, well, it often comes across as trite, clichéd, or just plain bad writing. However, I can think of a number of great sex scenes in literature (i.e. the carriage scene in Madame Bovary...albeit the technique there was more implication than anything else), Steve Yarbrough has a great sex scene in The End of California. There are, certainly, many others. But I came across this article in the Guardian in which the author uses the work of novelist Michael Houellebecq to make his point. The author also cites Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach as an example of why using literary posturing to describe sex scenes is a turn-off; he argues, they just plain don't get it. 

I haven't had the time to mosey on down to the local bookstore and just walk around to glimpse the new titles (this, before I started graduate school, was one of my favorite pastimes).  It seems these days I only read what is recommended to me by the incredibly well read faculty of our MFA program (the list, I'm afraid, is only getting longer).  I still, however, like to check out the NY Times book review, scouting for debut novels, just to see what my contemporaries are publishing.  I recently came across "Last Last Chance" by Fiona Mazzel and I'm struck by the conceit, even though it seems a little gimicky and sensationalist.  It does, however, strike me as quite a marketable book: drugs and terrorism!  If anyone's read this, I would appreciate a recommendation.  The NY Times review isn't exactly glowing. 

 

Thank you to everyone who has submitted to our journal. Our reading period is now closed and we will not be accepting any submissions until August 1st. If we plan on accepting your piece for issue 20.2, you will be hearing from us within the next 2-3 weeks. We will also be announcing the winner and finalists for the 2008 Wabash Prize in fiction by the end of this month at the latest. Thank you again to all those who have submitted work to us. Keep writing.

There is an interesting article (The Writing Man's Burden) publised in the New York Sun about the literary battle between novelist Martin Amis and British critic, Terry Eagleton written by Adam Kirsch.  I wasn't privy to this literary warfare (perhaps because the drama was over in England) but like any other good consumer, I love gossip. Apparently Amis's comments about how to resolve the problem with Islamic Terrorism spawned a debate that got personal quite fast. This article, for what its worth, is quite informative.  Kirsch also reviews Amis's latest book, The Second Plane, a collection of short stories. 

At one point, he writes: "This kind of vulgarity, which has always been characteristic of Mr. Amis’s attempts to come to grips with serious themes, also helps to explain why the two pieces of fiction in “The Second Plane” miscarry. “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” which traces the terrorist’s thoughts in the hours before he piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center, suffers from the same programmatic quality that afflicted John Updike’s novel “Terrorist.” In the absence of true empathy with a terrorist — empathy of the sort that Dostoevsky brought to bear in “The Possessed,” or Conrad in “The Secret Agent” — Mr. Amis can only recite Atta’s motives, as though checking off points on an outline. His fear of women, his “ferocity and rectitude,” are mentioned but not inhabited."

There is an interesting (and quite well written) travelogue by Lawerence Downes in the New York Times abuot Manzanillo, Mexico (where Kesey ran off to after a fake suicide letter in order to escape incarceration for drug charges by the FBI).  Kesey is best known for his first novel, "One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest."

The deadline for the Wabash Prize in fiction being judged this year by Richard Bausch is tomorrow. We will accept your submission if it has a postmark date of March 15th. So get those stories to us. The prize pays $1000 and publication. Complete guidelines to the right.

Iranian poet, Simin Behbahani is the first recepient of the Beta award from Stanford University.  Of Behbahani, Cynthia Haven of the Stanford News Service, writes: "Behbahani is one of the most prominent figures of modern Persian literature and one of the most outstanding among contemporary Persian poets, as well as a leading dissident. She is Iran's national poet and an icon of the Iranian intelligentsia and literati, who affectionately refer to her as the "lioness of Iran." Her poems are quoted like aphorisms and proverbs." 

Behbahani was also nominated for the Noble prize in literature in 1997.  The award ceremony is set for March 11th. 

With so many great blogs on the iternet, it's really a matter of time to get to them all.  Sometimes I feel that there aren't enough hours in the day to get my fill of blog reading (I admit, I'm oldfashioned and would rather curl up with a book).  But I do enjoy getting my literary news on the internet.  I just found out that a site I visited often to get caught up on author, publishing, and literary news (www.bookstandard.com) has been added to Kirkus review.  No longer can I read this news for free!  Kirkus review requires a membership fee to view any of their news items or book reviews.  Anyone know of a good site to get a daily report about goingson in the literary world?  While I support literary endeavours, $37.50 a month for web access is too rich for my blood.  Does anyone know what happend to the bookstandard?

I did, however, come across a blog by the editors of the New York Times Review of Books, called papercuts.  It's witty and fun to read.  You should check it out. 

 

Sycamore Review is throwing a party to celebrate twenty years of publication and to help support and expand our Looseleaf workshops, a public community enterprise to promote and foster the written word. If you happen to be in Lafayette, Indiana, please stop by. There will be live jazz, great food and drink, as well as a raffle with amazing prizes. This event is made possible by the generosity of the following sponsors:

• Club CityFit - http://www.clubcityfit.com/index.html
  Mike's Express Carwash - http://www.mikescarwash.com/
  The Game Preserve - http://www.gamepreserve.com/
  Euphoria Day Spa & Salon - http://www.euphoriadayspaandsalon.com/
  Inspired Fire Glass Studio & Gallery - http://www.inspiredfire.com/
  Panera Bread - http://www.panerabread.com/
  Lafayette Symphony Orchestra - http://www.lafayettesymphony.org/main
  Bistro 501 -
• Rubia Flower Market - http://rubiainc.com/
  Von's Book Shop
  Maize, An American Grill - http://www.maizeinc.com/
  The Black Sparrow - http://www.blacksparrowpub.com/
  Mike Aulby's Arrowhead Bowl - http://www.arrowheadbowl.com/
  O'Bryan's Nine Irish Brothers - http://www.nineirishbrothers.com/
  Collette 
  Evan Todd Salon/Day Spa - http://www.evantoddaveda.com/home/index.php
  Great Harvest Bread Co. - http://www.greatharvest.com
• Randy Ross Custom Framing & Fine Art
• Knickerbocker Saloon
• Exotic Thai
• K. Dees Coffee and Roasting Co.
• Khana Khazana Indian Grill
• Panera Bread
• Akropolis Restaurant

One of my favorite short story writers, Jhumpa Lahiri, has a new book coming out in April.  The short story collection consists of eight new stories.  Lahiri's publisher, Knopf, says of the collection that her stories are "longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers."  If you haven't read any of Lahiri's work, it's worth studying her stories for craft.  She is a master of the form and her stories, I daresay, encompass worlds as vividly as Alice Munro. 

If you happen to be in the Boston area, Lahiri will be reading at MIT on Tuesday March 4th.  Here is a link to the details:   http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/org/h/humanistic/www/writersseries/jhumpa_lahiri.pdf

Those of you lucky enough to go, please be sure to e-mail and let me know how it went. 

One of my hang-ups as a writer has been this issue of politics and its role in fiction. Often, I come to the defense of politics in fiction, arguing that not only is it important, but an imperative. But let me be clear. No writer wants to be caged, to be told to write a certain kind of fiction. While not all fiction is, or should be, political, I think it’s a fallacy to argue that one can ignore the force that politics has on any given writer. It presses upon and wants to enter. Therefore, to ignore politics in fiction for the sake of ignoring politics, I think, becomes a form of escapism.

I’m thinking of all this because I just read an essay (“Outside the Whale”) by Salman Rushdie published in 1984 in his collection entitled, Imaginary Homelands. The essay, despite its peculiar introduction, uses George Orwell’s piece (from which Rushdie derives his own title) to introduce this question of politics and its role in literature. In Orwell’s essay (published in 1940), Orwell cites the work of Henry Miller and praises its ability to be ‘nonpolitical…non-ethical…non-literary…non-contemporary.’ In being so, Orwell argues, Miller’s work “can speak with the people’s voice.” Orwell than moves to dismiss the “politically committed generation” of Auden, Spender, and MacNeice. He writes, “On the whole, the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics.” He uses Miller’s comparison of Anais Nin to Jonah in the whale’s belly, writing “Miller himself is inside the whale,…a willing Jonah…He feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting. It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism.” Quietism, interestingly enough, becomes the crux of Orwell’s argument in Miller’s defense.

Rushdie argues that electing to ignore the world around him and retreating to the womb-like enclosure of the whale (the quietist worldview) is both impossible and a fallacy in our world. He asks us to remember the age in which Orwell lived, the age of Hitler and Stalin… “the overwhelming evils of exterminations and purges and fire-bombings, and all the appalling manifestations of politics-gone-wild.” And it is in response to this, Rushdie argues, that Orwell turned to escapism, to his notion of the ordinary man as victim and passive. It is odd, Rushdie goes on to argue, that the author of Animal Farm be “unwilling to concede that literature was best able to defend language, to do battle with the twisters, precisely by entering the political arena.” He writes, “The truth is that there is no whale. We live in a world without hiding places; the missiles have made sure of that. However much we may wish to return to the womb, we cannot be unborn…So, in place of Jonah’s womb, I am recommending the ancient tradition of making as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible. Where Orwell wished quietism, let there be rowdyism; the place of the whale, the protesting wail.” Rushdie’s point that we cannot isolate ourselves from the politics of our world therefore justifies the need for political fiction, for the “continual quarrel, the dialectic of history.” His argument that we are “radioactive” with history and politics is an important point to make, and a valid one, I feel. It forces each of us to ask ourselves what responsibility we have in addressing the political, in grappling with history. In making a fuss. Granted Rushdie is arguably on of our most political writers working today, I still think he makes an important point about politics and literature. A point that I believe is echoed in Sycamore’s mission statement.