David Samuel Levinson's Blog, page 9

You Are Not an Interpreter of Drown

I've been thinking about the short story and a recent conversation I had with a friend who had a miserable time placing his story collection. In the end, he finally submitted to a contest and, lo and behold, he won the Flannery O'Connor Award For Short Fiction. The collection was received well and he got [...:]

The Super Sad Trend in Contemporary Fiction

But, given the hype this novel has received, I feel a kind of literary responsibility to say: I'm sorry, and nothing personal against Mr. Shteyngart, but this is simply not a good novel.

Dear Tana French

Dear Ms. French, I read In The Woods, your first Murder Squad novel (I didn't know they were called Murder Squad novels until I saw the phrase bandied about) and remember it vividly, not just because the story was so riveting but because the writing itself was so riveting as well. Then, I picked up [...:]

Uncivil Wars

A couple of years ago, on a hot August afternoon, I got a call from the medium I'd paid to give me an over-the-phone reading. I was nervous as I said my name and she began to record our session. I thought she'd tell me my future and I suppose she did, though not in [...:]

Beware The Kindness of The Blurber

Years ago, while I was still living in New York, a friend invited me to an MFA reading at Columbia University. There, I met another fiction writer, who, a couple of weeks later, asked me if I wanted to go with him to a reading at Princeton. Having never been to Princeton, I said yes. [...:]

Dear Editor

Dear Editor at [Name of Big Reputed Publishing House:]: Thank you for lifting my manuscript, [Insert Title:], out of the bottom of the pile, giving your time to it, hauling it around with you in your give-away NPR tote bag or on your Kindle (doesn't the Kindle weigh just as much as a manuscript?), through [...:]

No Place Like Someone Else's Home

It's true. I'm an itinerant bastard. I've lived in dozens and dozens of different apartments over the last two dozen years. I'm not sure when I decided to move every year, but I have. Now, in a sublet in Berlin, I have an apartment that I love and that has everything a boy (and writer) [...:]

A Grubby Beginning

In honor of George Gissing, I inaugurate this weblog. Call it a journal of the publishing years. And speaking of which, I thought a little history was in order. Sadly, not that much seems to have changed. The hacks still get the huge advances and we of the literary fiction variety are still grubbing in the [...:]

In Medias Res

Most contemporary writers, who have spent any time in an MFA program, have been taught, told, scolded, commanded, and ultimately shamed into starting whatever they're working on—their short stories, novels, novellas, memoirs, and loosely veiled autobiography that masquerades as fiction—in media res, i.e., in the middle of things. Why start in the middle of things? [...:]