Seeking short fiction: Front&Centre
Front&Centre is seeking edgy short fiction [HT: Places for Writers]:
We are looking for fiction set in a realist tone, that concerns the contemporary. We are strictly non-genre and DO NOT publish science fiction, horror, fantasy or fluff of any kind. We prefer dirty realism, urban angst, noir and tales of ordinary woe. Otherwise, thematically, the magazine is wide open. Quality new fiction is what we want. More information at Front&Centre…
A.C. Grayling on Secrets of the Universe
A.C. Grayling on Paul Murdin’s Secrets of the Universe: How We Discovered the Cosmos:
Jeremiah Horrocks and his friend William Crabtree were ecstatic when they observed the transit of Venus on 24 November 1639. Horrocks had predicted the date of the transit by carefully applying Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables of planetary motion, published twelve years before. The two amateur astronomers watched the black dot of Venus inch its way across the burning image of the sun projected onto a card in Crabtree’s attic. Horrocks described his friend as standing ‘rapt in contemplation’ for a long time, unable to move, ’scarcely trusting his senses, through excess of joy.’ The emotion he and Crabtree felt is one well known to science: the exhilaration of securing empirical proof of theory. Continue reading at Barnes and Noble Review
PW: YA Novels Take Heat for Biblical Reinterpretation
Publishers Weekly is reporting on a hard-working YA novelist, David Michael Slater, who finds himself in a difficult place: on the one hand, people are finally talking about his books, on the other, they find them to be heretical:
In the first installment, The Book of Nonsense (2008), the twins uncover secrets about their own family history while also getting hints of a larger cosmic drama, learning about a secret language that God may have used to create the world. In The Book of Knowledge, they follow clues to the original Garden of Eden and discover that the record of primordial events recorded in Genesis may not tell the whole story. Read the whole story at PW…
Breaking News: Colum McCann wins National Book award for fiction
Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann
Random House (2009)
368 Pages
From the Guardian: “Colum McCann won the fiction prize at the National Book awards in New York last night for his novel Let the Great World Spin, an allegorical story inspired by the events of 9/11 and set around Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the twin towers in 1974.” Continue reading…
