Dragnet Issue Four contributor Suzannah Showler interviewed Pasha Malla about his new novel, People Park, for The A.V. Club. But it is more like listening in on a really interesting and insightful conversation about writing between two very talented writers. Also, you had me at Wu Tang, Pasha.

copyeditor:

thepenguinpress:

Famous writers and their typewriters.

Kerouac’s or Hemingway’s.

Charles Dickens will not be attending the Dragnet Issue Four launch party. But that’s because he is dead. If he wasn’t, I can assure you he would be coming, as it is going to be jam packed with talented writers and other fun and awesome people. Plus beer. A winning combo really. Also, follow the click through link for a neat article about why it is cool to be friends with authors. 

See y’all tomorrow!

The Paris Review has a pretty sweet blog, and the other day they posted something that should make every literary geek’s heat palpitate with joy. The set-up:

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

The awesome thing that happened? A bunch of the authors actually responded. And this kid was not screwing around; he contacted some of the biggest names in literature: Kerouac, Bradbury, Rand, Mailer, and Updike, to name a few. The responses of the authors and some context from Bruce make this a most charming read.

writersnoonereads:

From wikipedia:

Juan José Arreola Zúñiga (September 21, 1918 – December 3, 2001) was a Mexican writer and academic. He is considered Mexico’s premier experimental short story writer of the twentieth century. Arreola is recognized as one of the first Latin American writers to abandon realism; he uses elements of fantasy to underscore existentialist and absurdist ideas in his work […]

In English (Amazon links):
—Confabulario and Other Inventions (sample on Google Books, thank you (un)justly (un)read )

—The Fair