Alex Kudera's Blog, page 104

The Adjunct Novel at Inside Higher Ed

From Colleen Flaherty's "The Adjunct Novel" at Inside Higher Ed:

Alex Kudera, who has spent many years as a non-tenure-track professor of English, made waves in 2010 with his book about Cyrus “Duffy” Duffleman, a Philadelphia-area adjunct who travels around the city to five different jobs. Fight for Your Long Day traces Duffleman’s steps and the various indignities he experiences inside the classroom and out. He’s always running late, for example, and is wrongly accused of sleeping with a student by a college counselor, but still shows dedication to his work.

Kudera published Auggie’s Revenge , which touches on similar themes and features as adjunct as its central character, earlier this year. Hinting that some audiences aren’t quite ready for a full-on fictionalized takedown of adjunct issues, he said via email that his work might be “a more brutal version of socioeconomic America than relatively affluent urban readers like to see in their novels.”

National Novel Writing Month 2016

In November 2016, I am participating in National Novel Writing Month. Although it's easy to recognize that novels don't get completed in a month, some famous rough drafts were written in a literary sprint. Jack Kerouac's original scroll for the On the Road is said to have been written in less than a month, and Paul Auster's novella-length memoir "Portrait of an Invisible Man" is said to have been written in two to three weeks. It's possibly only rumor that Thomas Pynchon wrote a full draft of The Crying of Lot 49 in a few weeks.

For Fight for Your Long D ay I used a period of significantly less than my usual workload combined with less access to the internet to write the full 90,000-word rough draft from late June through early August of 2004. Substantial editing was required before it was contracted in early February 2010 and then published on October 1 that year. Spark Park's 125,000-word rough draft was also written "on a roll," and I wrote many short stories that way years ago. Auggie's Revenge was written on and off from December 2004 through final edits in July 2015 without a sustained period of uninterrupted writing of more than several hours each day.

For #NaNoWriMo2016, I already have 37,000 words (135 double-spaced Word pages) for the sequel to Fight for Your Long Day, and my goal is to create a complete rough draft by November 30 and a good rough draft (something I could show a friend without too much embarrassment) by January 1. According to #NaNoWriMo's website the goal is a 50,000-word novel from November 1 through November 30, so what I am doing is similar, if not exactly the same.

Booker Prize to Beatty

A few days ago, I recognized Paul Beatty's Man Booker Prize win for The Sellout with five fun tweets.



Auggie's Revenge: Reviews, Interviews, and Excerpts

Book Reviews:

"When Opposites Attract: An Adjunct Takes to the Streets"  by Joe Domino, The Huffington Post, April 25, 2016

"Academic Novels for Real People," by Ms. Mentor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 3, 2016

Find more reviews and ratings at Goodreads and Amazon.

Interviews:

"Heartbreaking Stories from Academia. . ." by Roslyn Fuller, AlterNet, September 20, 2016

"This Podcast Will Change Your Life: AWP Edition, Part 5 -- Patron Saint, Starring The Alex Kudera" by Ben Tanzer, This Podcast Will Change Your Life, August 17, 2016

"Interview with Alex Kudera Part 1" by Eric Gilliland, E. Patrick's Blog, May 24, 2016

"Interview with Alex Kudera Part 2" by Eric Gilliland, E. Patrick's Blog, May 31, 2016

"Interview with Alex Kudera" by Chris Kelso, Chris Kelso Blog, April 5, 2016

"In Conversation: Lavinia Ludlow Interviews Alex Kudera" by Lavinia Ludlow, The Next Best Book Blog, April 26, 2016

Excerpts:

Part II, Chapter 1: "MasterCard Marxists and 403b Feminists" at The Rag

Part I, Chapters 1-3: Auggie's Revenge Sample at Beating Windward Press

Nobel fun

Over at Facebook, novelist-publisher Michael J. Seidlinger brought my attention to this fun Alex Sheppard article on the Nobel Prize in Literature. It comes complete with odds for famous writers who'll never win, and unknown stars who could.

Dr. Roslyn Fuller on adjuncts in academia

Dr. Roslyn Fuller's "Heartbreaking Stories from Academia: America's Universities Treat Most Faculty Like Peons and the Results Are Not Pretty" rose to the top of the AlterNet earlier today.

Roslyn Fuller on adjuncts in academia

Roslyn Fuller's "Heartbreaking Stories from Academia: America's Universities Treat Most Faculty Like Peons and the Results Are Not Pretty" rose to the top of the AlterNet earlier today.

fiction from Alan Gerstle

Today I was walking along West 53rd Street, on the block where the Museum of Modern Art is located, preoccupied with something I don't recall. I was on my way to an audition, for what I don't remember, except that it was for a courtroom drama, an episode for a TV series. It was the hottest day of the year thus far, a day in late June, a Friday, and it was humid. I am prone to daydream on warm, muggy days in Manhattan. Maybe because I wish I were someplace else.
Follow the link to read more.

return to when falls. . .

And on the 18th day of September, 2016, I blogged again at When Falls The Coliseum. Look for more from there soon.

from The Lay of the Land

"I watch CNN every night, but never afterward think much about anything I see--even the election, as stupid as it is. I've come to loathe most sports, which I used to love--a loss I attribute to having seen the same thing over and over again too many times. Only death-row stories and sumo wrestling (narrated in Japanese) will keep me at the TV longer than ten minutes. My bedside table, as I've said, has novels and biographies I've read thirty pages into but can't tell you much about."

~~ Frank Bascombe from Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, p.250