Off the Page Now an E-Book

So, for the tiniest bit of self-promotion.

Off the Page is now available as an e-book, on these sites:

Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com , amazon.co.uk.

And these places still have the hard copy:

In the US, the beloved Politics & Prose in Washington, DC, McNally Jackson in NYC -- or find an independent near you via Indie Bookstore Finder.
In the UK, Foyles and Waterstones.

A favorite quote from Off the Page, from Mary Kay Zuravleff, whose third novel, Man Alive!, is also available at the above bookstores.

"I’m writing to match some tune in my head, some flavor from a dream, translated into words on a page. The first few drafts, my people move monstrously through contrived mazes. Eventually, I can stop pounding on their chests and filling their lungs. They’ll sit up and blink, and then, to my amazement, samba down a path far more imaginative and inevitable than what I’d envisioned.

 

Once we’re all satisfied, there are still drafts devoted to language and description, gestures and observations. When I make a pass for smells, I’m almost done. For both of my novels, I gave a draft to a few choice critics whose exceptional advice was on the order of, “I almost see the constellation you were aiming at, but you missed a star here. And here.”

Then I rewrite it one more time."

Banks Makes 'Physiological' Shift to Stories

Although Russell Banks is a writer known for both short stories and novels -- most recently "Lost Memory of Skin," which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award -- his new book, "A Permanent Member of the Family" (Ecco), is his first collection of stories in 15 years.  He talked about the short story form in my Washington Post interview with him, which ran today. 

Here's an excerpt from my transcript, less edited than the Post version:

Why did you come back to the short story form?

I had written three novels in the intervening years, and they were hard novels – they weren’t easy to write.  I came up out of the depths of “Lost Memory of Skin” feeling kind of exhausted and that I really needed to work on the other side of my brain. Short stories feel as though they do come from a different place entirely. It’s not just a literary shift, but a physiological one. They’re much closer to writing songs or poems.  Your attachment to language is different, your attachment to form is different. A novel is so large and amorphous that you live inside a novel, whereas with a short story you can have a slightly distanced approach.

How do you know an idea is a novel and not a short story?

I can almost always tell immediately, if what I’m looking at is a moment of transition in someone’s life -- that’s what the short story does best. It implies time past and it implies time future but it’s the moment itself, the moment of change, that  we're focused on.

You might also check out The Washington Post books page.