Category: words

Modern Farmer‘s founding editor describes it as “the farming magazine for media professionals”. Sound silly? It won a National Magazine Award after only three issues.

“6. If you don’t know a word, look it up or die.”

“Modern American culture encourages us to spend beyond our limits – what happens tomorrow when a cash-strapped government requires us to spend beyond our limits? Or, today our culture practically worships celebrities. What happens tomorrow when some of us literally worship celebrities? It’s a fertile field for satire.”

“It’s an e-book, a series of websites and web TV shows, and a vehicle for content sponsored by companies. And if it succeeds, it could usher in a new business model for publishers, one that blurs the lines between art and commerce in ways that are routine in TV shows and movies but rare in books.”

“The motor that drives the single-year book is, I think, this tingling fascination or sense of intrigue we often experience when examining the past. But for such an examination to really tingle it must be focused and have a clear structure to it.”

“For a fiction writer, editing an anthology offers multiple lessons. You learn directly from the stories, but also from the lives of the writers and from the process of acquiring the stories. The information you gather seems more like intelligence, because you’re often a detective trying to solve an inexplicable case.”

An interview with Michael Denneny, who co-founded the pathbreaking literary magazine Christopher Street and was the first man to make a career out of editing and publishing serious gay novels.

“At some point, it’s just you and the poems. You haven’t been told to read a poem, you haven’t been assigned a poem to critique, you haven’t been told a book’s really great, so you’re just picking up books that either speak to you or don’t. You’re just looking through book after book after book trying to find something engaging.”

At the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, Andrew Wylie “call[ed] Amazon ‘the equivalent of ISIS,’ 50 Shades of Grey ‘one of the most embarrassing moments in Western culture,’ and self-publishing ‘the aesthetic equivalent of telling everyone who sings in the shower they deserve to be in La Scala’.”

“What does this mean for authors? Should we give up on interactive fiction? No, I don’t think so, but I do think we need to be aware from the outset it that it may have to be limber enough to straddle several mediums and formats.”