Here's a crop of zooming-toward-year's-end links:
- Short fiction published online will now be eligible for inclusion in the annual Best American Short Stories. My first few years of publication were all online, including what I think is one of my best stories. I was too scared to submit to fancy-shmancy print journals. Actually, some of the online journals are very very good, have stringent editorial processes, and publish fine work, so this is a long overdue step. Now if only they'd change the title of the series--people from Caribbean, Central and South American nations consider it the worst kind of chauvinism when U.S. entities use the word "American" in an exclusive sense. The news on the BASS change came from Practicing Writing.
- "Why are most of your stories so lifeless and irrelevant?" "Why do you mostly publish fiction by men?" "When you do occasionally publish something by a writer of color, why is it always accompanied by some weirdly exoticizing illustration?" Hey, these are just some examples off the top of my head. I'm sure you can come up with better questions for New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman. Go here to send them.
- It's a familiar pitfall in the reading lives of people of color and of whites with even a modicum of consciousness about racism. You're buzzing through a well-written novel, enjoying it immensely--until, slam, you ram up against some offensive portrayal of Black, Latin@ or other characters who are from other than the middle-class white milieu the author clearly considers the norm. You try to give the author the benefit of the doubt and you keep reading, but no, here it comes again, and again, and you throw the book down in disgust. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, whose novel The Dirty Girls Social Club I really liked when I read it some years ago, has posted a provocative, incisive critique of popular writer Jodi Picoult and her racist, stereotypical treatment of Black and Latina characters on her blog. That was several days ago; since then Picoult has responded and Valdes-Rodriguez commented further. The alert on all this came from Tayari Jones' blog.
- Finally, check out the lament of an "oilan," a sharp dig at U.S. imperialism by Tony Christini at A Pragmatic Policy. And while you're at it, go sign the petition demanding that the "Iraqi government"* set Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe-throwing journalist, free.
*"Iraqi government" is so-called because Iraq is an occupied nation with a puppet apparatus fronting for the real rulers, the U.S. military.
