Category: words

• There are so many writers’ workshops these days it’s difficult not to trip over one. So the question is revived again – can good writing be taught, Hilma Wolitzer wonders? – New York Times

Seems like everyone and his dog has an I-Remember-The-New-Yorker book coming out. Now, spoofs from the man who sold MR. SHAWN his nuts, a woman who once worked for Shawn for an afternoon in the typing pool, and the legendary editor’s favorite night watchman. And, oh look…isn’t that Sparky at the word processor? – Slate

Irish poet Seamus Heaney beats out Harry Potter and wins his second Whitbread for Beowulf translation. – The Telegraph (UK)

• BBC report

David Laskin’s new book, “Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals” is “stiflingly” long. But then, just what is more fitting? Just what, exactly have the NYI’s given the world, anyway? – New York Press

Nobel-winner Heaney and bagpiper Liam O’Flynn are performing together in a “unique partnership of bardic voice and eloquent pipe.” Heaney reads his poetry and O’Flynn follows him on the pipes, exploring turn of line, enjambments, rhymes, and cadences in a medium of euphonious conversation. “Declaim the verse, strike up the pipe, and generally vent the pent!” – The Scotsman

— nominees chosen.  – New York Times

• British publisher, expecting spectacular demand for its line of “Star Wars” books following last summer’s “Phantom Menace,” prints 13 million copies. But only 3 million sell and firm has to eat an even more spectacular £25 million loss in the last six months of 1999. – BBC

Not yet 30, Dave Eggers is already shaping up as the Andy Kaufman of New York letters. The buzz on his first book, due out next month, is so frenzied that The New Yorker has bought an excerpt, editors at Time are clamoring for him, and his hero, David Foster Wallace, has provided a back-cover blurb so effusive it’s almost embarrassing. It’s not all smooth, though – the book is a memoir spilling family secrets so sad and self-revelations so awful that he sometimes wishes he had never written it. – New York Magazine

No country is more haunted by the spirit of its dead writers than Russia. Yet the Russian image of the novelist is no longer that of reverent seer or even heroic dissident. If anyone embodies the new image of the writer in Russia it is the 38-year-old Victor Pelevin, a laconic semi-recluse with a shaved head, a fashionable interest in Zen meditation and an eccentric attachment to dark glasses. Pelevin has emerged as that unusual thing: a genuinely popular serious writer. – New York Times Magazine

The best novelists have read all the classics, right? Uh, uh. Here’s a survey of some of Britain’s top contemporary writers and their confessions about what parts of the literary canon they have skipped over. – The Telegraph (UK)