Hey All,
Check out Janet Maslin's review of TNS#1 Contributor, Ron Rash's new novel, Serena.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/books/06masl.html?_r=1&ei=5070&emc=eta1&oref=slogin
I think that makes 2 contributors in the NY Times Recently. How you like 'dem apples?
-- SWC
This is the blog for The Normal School, a literary almanac of distinction. This is it. Trust us. We're normal.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
R.I.P. D.F.W.
[1]
[1] David Foster Wallace was a seminal influence on The Normal School. To hear of the passing of such a monumentally talented and darkly comic mind, one so unabashedly unafraid to speak truth to power while at the same time investigating not only that mind’s own motives for doing so but also at the same time our own complicity in any gross abuses of power, leaves us trembling for the future. However unsettling this death is, David Foster Wallace was a writer who left behind a corpus of work that will always be with us. The Normal School takes solace in books, and David Foster Wallace’s books are some of our favorites. A book may be of little consolation to family and loved ones left behind, but for those of us unfamiliar admirers from afar, David Foster Wallace is immortal.
[1] David Foster Wallace was a seminal influence on The Normal School. To hear of the passing of such a monumentally talented and darkly comic mind, one so unabashedly unafraid to speak truth to power while at the same time investigating not only that mind’s own motives for doing so but also at the same time our own complicity in any gross abuses of power, leaves us trembling for the future. However unsettling this death is, David Foster Wallace was a writer who left behind a corpus of work that will always be with us. The Normal School takes solace in books, and David Foster Wallace’s books are some of our favorites. A book may be of little consolation to family and loved ones left behind, but for those of us unfamiliar admirers from afar, David Foster Wallace is immortal.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Normalistaz,
Juan Felipe Herrera, contributor to TNS#1, was recently featured in the New York Times Book Reviews.
For your enjoyment:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/books/review/Burt2-t.html
Barry Normal
Juan Felipe Herrera, contributor to TNS#1, was recently featured in the New York Times Book Reviews.
For your enjoyment:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/books/review/Burt2-t.html
Barry Normal
Normal Fiction Editor Reviews for LA Times
Normals,
Check out this review in the LA Times by TNS Fiction Editor, Alex Espinoza.
www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-stephanie-griest10-2008aug10,0,5827102.story
Barry Normal
Check out this review in the LA Times by TNS Fiction Editor, Alex Espinoza.
www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-stephanie-griest10-2008aug10,0,5827102.story
Barry Normal
You Want a Sticker, Don't You?
You want one. You know you do. Our stickers are like the stiff black stitches you proudly display as you tell the story of how you got them.
http://www.debbieyee.com/2008/05/19/rejection-ooh-a-sticker/
So come and get some. Our next reading period opens on September 1st. Show us what you've got.
www.thenormalschool.com
Nofiction.
Poetry.
Stories.
Critique.
http://www.debbieyee.com/2008/05/19/rejection-ooh-a-sticker/
So come and get some. Our next reading period opens on September 1st. Show us what you've got.
www.thenormalschool.com
Nofiction.
Poetry.
Stories.
Critique.
Follow that Editor!
Normal Poetry Editor Brian Turner's whereabouts were recently triangulated using the latest in echo-location technology: listening to National Public Radio.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92771250&sc=emaf
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92771250&sc=emaf
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Follow That Contributing Editor!
This from _New Pages_:
Virginia Quarterly Review
Volume 84 Number 2
Spring 2008
Quarterly
Review by Rav Grewal-Kök
The fiction in this issue of the VQR offers “Superhero Stories.” But none of the protagonists of the short fiction that opens the magazine – a discharged sailor who suffered psychic and physical wounds in the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic bomb test; a masked vigilante who comes across as “a slurring crackpot taking a momentary break from a barbiturate triathlon” in his only public appearance; and a homebody in boxer shorts who commandeers the voices of televangelists – are paragons of virtue. Instead, Scott Snyder, Tom Bissell, and George Singleton give us blackly comic portraits of the flawed and fallen. These are men forged and broken in violence, antiheroes for our own times.
Editor Ted Genoways notes in his preface that broadcast evangelism arose during the Depression from the same national longing that produced the first comic book superheroes. Bill Sizemore’s long essay on the unlikely career of Pat Robertson, the most influential later-day peddler of charismatic religion, suggests that our thirst for the miraculous has yet to be exhausted. Robertson claims to have spoken to God, battled Satan, diverted hurricanes, and has argued for the assassination of foreign leaders, used charitable donations to fund a diamond-mining operation in the Congo, and unleashed an army of graduates of a fourth-tier Christian law school to pack the Justice Department. Sizemore’s essay is a fascinating and chilling look at an American phenomenon.
Themes of impermanence and mortality run through many of the poems in this issue by Charles Simic, Charles Wright, Ted Kooser, Billy Collins and others. Simic’s “What He Said,” whose speaker describes the aftermath of the war in Europe sixty years ago, also bears witness to our own endless wars: “Seeing a young man in a wheelchair / Pushed by his mother / Who kept her eyes averted / So she wouldn’t see what the war did to him.” Michael Bishop’s understated elegy for his son, an instructor murdered in the Virginia Tech massacre, is composed with a lucid dignity that testifies to a vast paternal love and grief.
There is much more of note here, including Kwame Dawes on HIV and AIDS in Jamaica, Matthew Power on sailing to the Galapagos, Lawrence Weschler in conversation with Robert Irwin, and a comic from the great Chris Ware. The VQR is at the forefront of contemporary literary journals, offering journalism, fiction, poetry and criticism informed by a cosmopolitan and humane sensibility. This rich volume deserves to be read in entirety.
[vqronline.org]
Virginia Quarterly Review
Volume 84 Number 2
Spring 2008
Quarterly
Review by Rav Grewal-Kök
The fiction in this issue of the VQR offers “Superhero Stories.” But none of the protagonists of the short fiction that opens the magazine – a discharged sailor who suffered psychic and physical wounds in the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic bomb test; a masked vigilante who comes across as “a slurring crackpot taking a momentary break from a barbiturate triathlon” in his only public appearance; and a homebody in boxer shorts who commandeers the voices of televangelists – are paragons of virtue. Instead, Scott Snyder, Tom Bissell, and George Singleton give us blackly comic portraits of the flawed and fallen. These are men forged and broken in violence, antiheroes for our own times.
Editor Ted Genoways notes in his preface that broadcast evangelism arose during the Depression from the same national longing that produced the first comic book superheroes. Bill Sizemore’s long essay on the unlikely career of Pat Robertson, the most influential later-day peddler of charismatic religion, suggests that our thirst for the miraculous has yet to be exhausted. Robertson claims to have spoken to God, battled Satan, diverted hurricanes, and has argued for the assassination of foreign leaders, used charitable donations to fund a diamond-mining operation in the Congo, and unleashed an army of graduates of a fourth-tier Christian law school to pack the Justice Department. Sizemore’s essay is a fascinating and chilling look at an American phenomenon.
Themes of impermanence and mortality run through many of the poems in this issue by Charles Simic, Charles Wright, Ted Kooser, Billy Collins and others. Simic’s “What He Said,” whose speaker describes the aftermath of the war in Europe sixty years ago, also bears witness to our own endless wars: “Seeing a young man in a wheelchair / Pushed by his mother / Who kept her eyes averted / So she wouldn’t see what the war did to him.” Michael Bishop’s understated elegy for his son, an instructor murdered in the Virginia Tech massacre, is composed with a lucid dignity that testifies to a vast paternal love and grief.
There is much more of note here, including Kwame Dawes on HIV and AIDS in Jamaica, Matthew Power on sailing to the Galapagos, Lawrence Weschler in conversation with Robert Irwin, and a comic from the great Chris Ware. The VQR is at the forefront of contemporary literary journals, offering journalism, fiction, poetry and criticism informed by a cosmopolitan and humane sensibility. This rich volume deserves to be read in entirety.
[vqronline.org]
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