How to Irritate Joyce Carol Oates

Yesterday, I conducted a public conversation with Joyce Carol Oates. I opened with some questions of my own, and then she fielded questions from the graduate student audience. One asked what advice JCO gives students in representing violence in fiction. ……
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Amitav Ghosh wrote back

I’m a longtime truehearted fan of Amitav Ghosh, a writer of enormous intellectual breadth and literary ambition. I wrote to him recently to let him know that my new novel owes a debt to an article he wrote for the ……
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First Fan Mail.

In a week when I’m grateful for having had a great deal of media coverage, the item that has most touched me is my first note from a reader, Mr. R. K. Moorthy, who agreed to let me post his ……
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The Novelist Waking…

Readers’ responses to the 4th of my National Post Afterword pieces, The Novelist Wakes, has moved me to say something about its genesis. As I said in my last post, I struggled with these pieces. Toughest was coming up with ……
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Tell it Slant

Today, the fourth of the four pieces I wrote as guest editor for the National Post Afterword blog will be published online. Most of their guest-editors contribute short essays on writing and culture or writing culture. One especially elegant set ……
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Ashwin Rao is Launched!

And Lata Pada came to the party. Lata is most justly famous as one of Canada’s premier choreographers of Indian classical dance. She also lost her husband and daughters in the Air India bombing, the central event from which my ……
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From SeeTanyaRead

Thank you, SeeTanyaRead, for what you said about my book. @padmav has written such a terribly brave book in THE EVER AFTER OF ASHWIN RAO. It's just stunning. — tanya boughtflower (@SeeTanyaRead) March 14, 2014

Oh, Mavis.

Read Mavis Gallant’s “When We Were Nearly Young” with my students on Friday, my first time teaching her work since she died, and maybe it was a little too soon, because I got all verklempt! My students looked a little ……
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Plots in motion

Thanks to Shaun Smith for including me this week on Fiction Craft. Loads of great advice from a diverse group of writers–a method for everyone! I shoehorned something in about my new novel, because it’s out this week and I ……
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