Stephen Delaney

“I hate judgments that only crush and don’t transform.”

— Elias Canetti

#booksky

How to respond to disgruntled readers.

On Hybrid Writing: Finding the Right Container for the Story You Need to Tell This is part five of a five-part series on the craft of writing by Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante. Some writers realize their projects with the use of a single genre’s craft (its strategi…

“When an obsession comes that wants words to be art, you choose (or invent) whatever container will best display it.” Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante on the power of hybrid writing.

Where to Submit Presses | Chapbooks | Journals + Anthologies | Fellowships + Other Opportunities Last updated July 3, 2025 If you are an editor or publisher and would like your journal, press, or literary organiza…

Heavy Feather Review's Where to Submit resource (updated for July 2025) is invaluable and full of presses, journals, and sites open for submissions.

heavyfeatherreview.org/calls/

“Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war … Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony.”

― Victor Shklovsky

#writing #art

“One of the strangest things about writing well is that it requires two different zones in the brain - rigor and recklessness - simultaneously.”
- Carole Maso

CANONGATE TO PUBLISH URSULA K. LE GUIN’S SELECTED WRITING ON LITERATURE CANONGATE TO PUBLISH URSULA K. LE GUIN’S SELECTED WRITING ON LITERATURE

Thrilled to announce Canongate will be publishing
WORDS ARE MY MATTER by Pulitzer Prize winner by Ursula K. Le Guin. A manual investigating the depth, breadth and importance of contemporary fiction.

canongate.co.uk/news/canonga...

Lydia Davis's INTO THE WEEDS (on how and why she writes) is due out September 16!

#booksky #writing

I like to keep an open book by my sink every morning. (Poetry and flash fiction work best.) It puts me in a better mood and keeps the world at bay.

#booksky

Deb Olin Unferth's "Likeable." Each time I read it it surprises me.

muumuuhouse.com/dou.fiction2...

Sorry I'm slow. Happy Birthday! 😀

“The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.”

— Julio Cortázar

#writing #fiction

Kazuo Ishiguro Reflects on Never Let Me Go, 20 Years Later While I’d been busy writing my fourth and fifth novels, my study had mysteriously transformed itself around me into a kind of miniature indoor jungle. Everywhere were dusty mountains of scribbled-o…

After 20 years, Kazuo Ishiguro reflects on the decades-long process behind Never Let Me Go.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

—Shirley Jackson

It's interesting when a writer's voice is so strong that the question is less "What will happen next?" than "Where will this writer's mind take me?"

#booksky

At the Point of the Sword, Magic | Los Angeles Review of Books Sarah McEachern reviews Clarice Lispector’s “Covert Joy: Selected Stories.”

"For all the challenges her work poses, Lispector is a very accessible writer: her prose is as welcoming, embracing, inviting as it is ethereal, sly, strange." Sarah McEachern reviews Clarice Lispector's "Covert Joy: Selected Stories." lareviewofbooks.org/article/at-t...

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”

― Clarice Lispector

#writers #writing

The Timeless Magic of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities at 50 Chesterland, Ohio, 1979 I’m six years old and watching my two older brothers roll dice on the orange linoleum tiles in the basement. If I move a muscle, I’ve been warned—if I speak so much as a sin…

“The cities are stars, the sections constellations, the book a galaxy, and Calvino’s structure allows a reader to study each star and admire its idiosyncrasies.” Anthony Doerr reflects on Invisible Cities at 50.

“Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.”

-- Robert Bresson

This cheered me up today (from CRONOPIOS AND FAMAS by Julio Cortazar).

#booksky #fiction

The Polymath of Pittsburgh Garielle Lutz is one of America’s great writers. Why has her literary genius gone unnoticed?

Garielle Lutz (author of Future Tense books, Partial List of People to Bleach and Assisted Living) is featured in The Nation. An amazing and moving profile.

Thanks so much!

Hi, Tania. Is it too late to be added? (Sorry--I'm still finding my way around here.) I like to mix literary and genre elements, and my latest piece combines flash and microfiction. Looks like a great list!

“You write from what you know but you write into what you don’t know.”

— Grace Paley

#writing #fiction

Lists make good prompts for flash stories and poems. This has some nice examples:

www.flavorwire.com/313307/15-of...

#writingprompt

Urgent Messages from Eternity | Deborah Eisenberg An exhibition of Franz Kafka’s postcards, letters, and manuscript pages rekindles our sense of him as a writer deeply connected to his own time and place.

“There seem to be a lot of people who approach (or avoid) Kafka’s fiction in anticipation of something somber, cryptic, too abstruse to enjoy. It’s unfortunate, because the fiction is mesmerizing,...often wildly funny.” —Deborah Eisenberg

“The public sphere is so debased that saying anything true is a breach of etiquette.”
– Robert Glück, About Ed

Chasing Mystery Through Fiction: On the Life and Literary Career of Mavis Gallant The Archives of The New Yorker consist of thousands upon thousands of letters and memos and cablegrams and onionskin-thin carbon copies—enough that, by the mid-1980s, a vertical stack of them might…

Garth Risk Hallberg remembers the life and literary career of Mavis Gallant, master of the short form.

Here's David Lynch on creativity and meditation. I'm skeptical about the whys but think there's something to this.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2UH...

#DavidLynch

“I think that in literature, deep down, realism can’t do without fantasy, somehow it needs it.”

― Julio Cortazar

#reading #fiction