“I thought to myself, ‘If I picked up this knife and stabbed the person across from me in the heart, for good or for bad it would just open this trap door and I would drop through it and never look at the same world again.’ ”
John Barber/Globe and Mail
fourthirtythree is a new audio magazine. We’ll be broadcasting and podcasting short stories of around five minutes (up to 1,000 words), written and read by some of the best contemporary writers. We’re looking for edgy, engaging stories about modern life - stories which work well when read aloud.
Our history with…[beer]… is long and colourful. Author Ian Coutts has documented it with his new book Brew North: How Canadians Made Beer and Beer Made Canada.
Jesse Skinner/Toro Magazine
When a handy label like “Ground Zero Mosque” emerges, it’s immediately attractive to bloggers and editors because it’s short and a little provocative. And once it becomes the accepted, if inaccurate, term for the thing, then not using it means sacrificing the easy searchability of the piece you’ve written.
Andrew Price/Good Magazine Blog
Remember the 48Hr Magazine challenge a little while ago? The theme was “Hustle” and after it was revealed we all had one day to send in our submissions, they had one day to produce the magazine. Well the folks at Longshot are at it again… and the theme will be revealed today at noon Pacific time (I’ll let you do the math). More details, plus a reminder of issue zero, are available within.
With one exception, the authors on this list don’t have the same recognition factor as those on the previous list (and the one exception is notorious for all the wrong reasons). However, while they are heterogeneous in style, subject, and approach, they share in common a vivacity and willingness to push the boundaries of language and form. And they make reading a joy, not a chore, which is something sorely lacking from much of our fiction these days.
Alex Good and Steven W. Beattie/The National Post
The fourth-graders were unanimous: Quicksand doesn’t scare them, not one bit. If you’re a 9- or 10-year-old at the P.S. 29 elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., you’ve got more pressing concerns: Dragons. Monsters. Big waves at the beach that might separate a girl from her mother. Thirty years ago, quicksand might have sprung up at recess, in pools of discolored asphalt or the dusty corners of the sandbox—step in the wrong place, and you’d die. But not anymore, a boy named Zayd tells me. “I think people used to be afraid of it,” he says. His classmates nod. “It was before we were born,” explains Owen. “Maybe it will come back one day.”
Daniel Engber/Slate
I was going on about some novel I was reading and loving and she cut me off and asked, when was the last time you read fiction by a woman? And I honestly couldn’t come up with anything for a few minutes. It was a pretty shameful moment, in part, because I started wondering about early onset memory loss…
Chris Jackson/The Atlantic
The first psychologist-novelist we have asked to write for us is Elaine Hatfield, a noted social psychologist whose best known work is on love and its social implications. Her first novel was Rosie, about a young psychologist, Rosie St Giles, who has a temporary teaching job at the University of Hawaii.
NUTSHELL: We want to make a batch of prints, t-shirts and totes featuring the lovely artwork of Carson Ellis, that we will then sell and use the proceeds to support all the purposey but not profity things we do — like host dozens of free events for unknown and emerging authors and artists, dedicate ample space to free and local literature, and donate time and resources to kindred causes.
Chloe Eudaly/Kickstarter
