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by Katherine Q. Stone
According to James Wood, The New Yorker literary critic introducing Karl Ove Knausgaard this afternoon, the first time the Norwegian novelist came to New York there were about twenty people at his reading. The room was filled with empty seats.
Read moreOn Saturday, January 31st, Fiction and the Fiction Club of CCNY held a reading at Bunga's Den in Manhattan. Featuring American author Joseph McElroy along with CCNY readers Lissa Weinstein, James White, and Coryn Brown, the reading was lots of fun and enabled the Fiction community to hear from four different and inspiring voices.
Read moreWriting is thinking and, we hope, at its most precise. When we crack open the Difficult, there’s a surge of feeling and emotion, understanding, that “I get it!” moment. If we’re wanting to avoid the Difficult (notice I’ve started capitalizing it, what is that about?) novel or short story, then what are we feeling? And, what are we thinking?
Read moreby Mark Jay Mirsky
In the past few months, I have found myself embroiled in the argument that the novel as an important creative form has died and that its death knell has tolled.
Read moreThis will be tiring for you, I know, and sometimes perhaps a little funny, because of my English pronunciation. So we can recuperate now and then, I will use quite a lot of quotes and the quotes you will hear in perfect English.
Read moreby Mark Jay Mirsky
In a complex (though damning) review of Peter Handke's "Crossing the Sierra Los Gredos," in the August 19, 2007 issue of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, one line caught my eye, and raised a vigorous "No, unfair!"
Read moreby Mark Jay Mirsky
When I am asked by writers what I look for in submissions to Fiction, I generally look blank. This is because I try to read the stories that come across my desk without preconceptions. I don't have a formula in my head. I know one editor of a prominent literary journal who announced that he could always tell from the first sentence whether a story was worth reading or not. I can't echo that. I do, however, usually know by the bottom of the first page whether or not I want to go on reading.
Read moreby Mark Jay Mirsky
In writing and thinking about the great figures in the world of fiction who have influenced me most, I am always drawn back to realize how engaged they are in the world of history, my second great love after literature. Donald Barthelme, without whose help and encouragement the magazine, Fiction, would never have begun, was passionate about politics and social issues, which permeate his fiction. Robert Musil's grasp of the balancing act of the Austrian Empire before the First World War is the background for his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities.
Read moreby Mark Jay Mirsky
Last summer, one of the staunchest admirers of Fiction, Dorothea Straus, passed away. Several years before that, sensing how fragile she was in the wake of her distinguished husband, the publisher Roger Straus's death, I went out to their historic mansion in Westchester to film her reading one of her stories. Roger had rebuilt the house after a fire. The grounds, which spread with the largesse of a great baronial estate, were the home of a family whose public contributions to the United States was writ large.
Read moreFICTION | City College of New York | Convent Ave. @ 138th St. | New York, NY 10031
Since its inception, FICTION has aimed to bring the experimental to a broader audience, and to bring new voices to the forefront, publishing emerging authors alongside well known and established writers. Find out more about getting published in FICTION at our Submissions page.