Results tagged “raymondcarver”

Having gotten to know Samuel Ligon from working at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference in past years, we were very excited to get a hold of his latest story collection, which took home the 2008 Autumn House Fiction Prize. At the conference, Ligon is known for being one of the most popular writing teachers, and his workshops are usually the most sought-after, quickly filling up. Not having been able to attend one yet ourselves, we were quite curious to find out more about all the fuss. And it's safe to say that after reading Drift and Swerve--we get it, loud and clear.

Adrian Tomine started making comics in his teens when he created Optic Nerve. In it, he tells stories about people who tend to be searching for answers to questions they seem to think everyone else already knows. After a few years putting out Optic Nerve on his own, it was picked up by publisher Drawn and Quarterly.

The Community Theatre is staging performances of three Raymond Carver short stories, What's in Alaska?, Fat and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Centre in West Seattle. Seattlest attended the Friday night performance and can attest that the actors all did a serviceable job of capturing the dramatic awkwardness and tension that fascinated Carver so much. His minimalistic work about shy ordinary people feeling passive and acquiescent doesn't offer aspiring Al Pacino types many opportunities for projectile scene chewing, which is generally a good thing, except for the generally depressing and underwhelming afterglow of wimpy victimhood that envelops you like a bad after taste.

Those design-obsessed types over at Coudal Partners have just recently posted Field Tested Books, an online compendium of book reviews by lots of bookish (and blogish) people. Not just your ordinary reviews, these focus on books read in specific places and the impact the locale had on the reader's experience (hence, Coudal likes to refer to them as "experience reviews" instead).