I noticed the GSU Review is now publishing as New South (still out of Georgia State University), and their inaugural issue is available here. Two pieces of content that caught my eye are a story by Keith Lee Morris, a fine writer in my hometown who fiction edits the wonderful South Carolina Review, and a poem by former Sycamore poetry editor, Cody Lumpkin, now working on his PhD in Nebraska. Congratulations to Cody on the publication.

Bookninja points to this list of 50 crime writers you should read. I'm usually not a big fan of lists (they seem to be popular with newspaper bloggers that don't have anything else to write about), but this one is pretty good.

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. 

Our Reading Series Coordinator, Dan Tyx, asked me to pass along this news:

"The Sycamore Review’s 2008 MFA Student Reading Series got off to a rollicking start last Tuesday at the Knickerbocker Saloon. The evening highlighted the eclectic talents of Purdue’s MFA students, with the selections ranging from flash fiction, audience participation poems, and studies of superheroes, to lyric poetry and moments of introspection. Last week’s readers were James Xiao, Chad Hardy, Brian Beglin, Theresa Smith, and Ruth Joynton.

"This week’s reading will be held on Tuesday, February 26th at 8:30 in the Knickerbocker. Featured readers will be Erin Blakeslee, Dave Blomenburg, Christopher Feliciano Arnold, Eric Scovel, Kathleen Connor, and Cheryl Quimba."

(That's MFA fiction writer and editorial assistant extraordinaire, Brian Beglin, in the image. Photo courtesy of Andre Venter.)

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. 

Robert Olen Butler has a new book of stories this spring that imagines the sex lives of famous political figures. The UK Times has the story. They focus on how he imagines sex between Charles and Diana, but also mention that he has a story about Bill and Hilary Clinton and George and Laura Bush. From the way it sounds, this book has the potential to be terrible or riveting (mainly because it sounds like a bad idea--I find well-handled bad ideas riveting).

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.

by Erin Blakeslee, Editorial Assistant

Or a texting approach to the novel?  CBS Sunday Morning recently did a segment on the Cell Phone Novel, a new genre emerging in Japan and poised to gain in popularity worldwide.  Mobile-phone-wielding authors type their work using text-messaging programs, then upload their fiction to a number of different websites that allow any interested reader to download it, often in serialized form.  (After all, the average cell phone screen is half the size of a credit card!)

Though Cell Phone Novels are generally free-of-charge to download, Japanese consumers have proven willing to open their wallets for printed copies in the bookstores, buying hundreds of thousands of Cell Phone Novel books last year alone.  Some thumb-callused novelists have even seen their work adapted for the large and small screens.

It is exciting to see people discover creative-writing uses for new media: Now that busy Tokyo commute can be spent writing or reading a potential new literary masterpiece.  However, with the hefty standard text-messaging fees my cellular plan sticks me with, I think I'll stick with old-fashioned paper for the time being.

Theresa also asked me to pass along something for those of you in Indiana:

Purdue’s own Don Platt will be giving a poetry reading at Butler University in Indianapolis this Thursday night at 7:30. The reading will be in Eidson-Duckwall Recital Hall. Check out the news release here. Platt has published three volumes of poetry, including My Father Says Grace (2007), Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns and Cloud Atlas. He has a fourth forthcoming. A professor of English at Purdue University, he lives in West Lafayette with his wife, the poet Dana Roeser, and their two daughters.

After Don’s beautiful reading at Purdue last March, the thought here is that it might be time for a road trip. We’ve even gotten the word that this promises there will be no snowstorms Thursday night.

--Theresa D. Smith

From our Events Planner:

While feedback on a piece of writing is often extraordinarily helpful—illuminating just that thing that we had most desperately needed illuminated—it can really just as easily be amorphous. Perplexing. Perhaps even misleading at times. Check out this online skit for Mitchell and Webb’s take on this necessary but odd system of dynamics. After I saw it, I came to suspect that I’ve been the villain as well as the victim in this scenario…

--Theresa D. Smith

Guardian reports the Coen Brothers are set to direct the movie adaptation of Michael Chabon's recent The Yiddish Police Man's Union, and that the movie will be "a noir thriller in the vein of Miller's Crossing." No word on when, but it should be interesting. In the interim, for those of you in the Lafayette area, Michael Chabon will be reading at Purdue in April for the annual Literary Awards ceremony.

My friend Alex sent me a Myspace bulletin directing me to this fancy online magazine of sci-fi etc. literature (his story, "The Human Moments" is on the front page). While I usually don't go for sci-fi or fantasy literature, the stories in this magazine seem interesting, and, honestly, I'm glad to know forums like this journal still exist. Perhaps old school slick magazines will make a comeback online (or maybe journals like Clarksworld are all over, and I just don't know about them? Drop some others in the comment bar if you know any).

Editorial Assistant extraordinaire Benjamin Kolp pointed this out to me today, which he found on BoingBoing. At the New Yorker website, TC Boyle is reading Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain," an amazing story. Many thanks to Ben for pointing this out. (And if you tool around their main fiction page, you can find writers reading stories by Trevor, Borges, Barthleme, and more.)