At Substack, George Saunders has launched Story Club, a master class on writing short fiction. Saunders will look at one story each month (looking at how fiction works and affects readers), offer writing exercises, and lead interactive class features. Students will help shape the curriculum. “I’m really excited about the spontaneous nature of this,” Saunders says, and adds that Story Club is an “attempt at democratizing graduate writing programs.”
CUNY is offering a selection of journalism, writing, and video-storytelling classes to the public in January and February. All classes are offered online. For a full list of courses, visit the January Academy.
According to Publishers Weekly, the two top-selling print books of 2021 were Mothering Heights, by children’s-book author Dav Pilkey, and American Marxism, by conservative radio host Mark R. Levin.
Joseph McBride, the author of biographies of Orson Welles and a new book on Billy Wilder, remembers cinephile, director, and actor Peter Bogdanovich. “In his earlier glory days, Peter was one of the few American cinephiles who managed to become a director like French cinephiles such as Truffaut and Godard and Chabrol,” McBride writes. “While doing so, Peter kept up his dedicated work as a chronicler and appreciator of classic filmmakers in a series of valuable interview books, including his invaluable John Ford.”
The Paris Review has posted a tribute to bell hooks by Niela Orr: “Reading hooks transformed my thinking on a bevy of subjects, including feminism, Buddhism, Christianity, celebrity, sex, romance, and the limits and possibilities of representation.”
The New York Review of Books is looking for a new managing editor.
Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 7:30pm Eastern Time, Cuban-born novelist Marcial Gala will discuss his new novel, Call Me Cassandra, with his translator, Anna Kushner, and writer Anderson Tepper. You can register to attend the event here.
