So very excited to have these small lovelies out in the world, courtesy of the most wonderful @foundpress.
If you do happen to order one, send me a private message on here or Twitter (or email) and let me know… for every copy sold, I’ll be donating $2 to either @plannedparenthood or the ACLU (your choice!). Thanks to y'all for being the absolute best.
In Nicholas Mainieri’s new novel, The Infinite, teens Luz and Jonah fall in love. They meet in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but are soon separated when Luz—who is undocumented and pregnant—is sent to live with her grandmother in Mexico. Here, author Nicholas Mainieri writes about five great books that take on the U.S.-Mexico border.
You don’t have to look that far to find horror. And your job as a writer, no matter how uncomfortable, is to occasionally but responsibly shine a lamp lit with blood into those dark corner of human existence.
Benjamin Percy, “There Will Be Blood,” from Thrill Me @graywolfpress (via dannygoodmanwriting)
Major successes occur mostly in obscurity (appreciated, if you’re lucky, by your family, and the writer-friends you’ve made, who understand). But, in general, ‘success’ only means that you get up every day and do an unseen thing. It takes a long time to finish a novel and a long time to find a home for it. Someone might glance at those solitary years of work and wonder why in the hell you’d want to do that. I can take pride in that, and hope that I’ve made a thing that will be useful to someone somewhere.
Nicholas Mainieri (@nicholasmainieri), author of the forthcoming novel The Infinite, in conversation with Andrew Ervin at @thetinhouse
(via dannygoodmanwriting)
Get Up Every Day and Do an Unseen Thing: A Conversation with Nicholas Mainieri
“When I rewrite I literally have to retype. Physical, marked-up manuscript on desk, new blank document on screen. By the end of this novel, I had retyped the complete draft from start to finish nine times. Inefficient, maybe, but it was the only way I could get it done. It was also best from an intellectual standpoint, however. Writing a story requires one really long sustained thought, one trail of logic—if this then this, over and over. But there’s a spirit hidden in there, too, somehow. The characters’ experiences become a kind of proof for ideas only understood through the rigor of repeating (rewriting) that complicated sequence again and again.”
“Sometimes the wrong turn is the only turn offered” is the anthem of the ill-fated characters who wade through post-Katrina New Orleans and cartel-ravaged Mexico in Mainieri’s engrossing debut novel about finding one’s place in the world.
This is going to be THE book this fall, I promise you. @nicholasmainieri‘s debut novel is absolutely gorgeous. Grab it up here or at your local bookstore. You’ll be so happy you did.
In an effort to take a much-needed break (we’ve been running fwriction : review, just the two of us, for five years now!), our submissions are now closed and will remain closed as the journal goes on a hiatus from publishing new work. We hope to re-open submissions some time in 2016 (most likely summer).
Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to read your work; it is not a privilege we take lightly, and we are anxious to begin reading new work again next year.
In the meantime, we will continue to promote and highlight those waffle-rocking works and authors currently at home in the journal.
Thanks so much, and here’s to another great year of writing!
All our best,
Danny Goodman & Laura Brown
www.fwrictionreview.com
We were living together, in the house I grew up in, had it to myself by then. Some friend told us to go for walks after we fought, to try that. So on an evening we’re walking, cooling down, something already wrong between us—I see that now—and we pass the cathedral and she pulls the door open and in we go, don’t know why. Dim, quiet. Shadow clouded the ceiling, vague forms, murals I can’t recall with any sharp lines. We sat in silence. We were small and smothered under impenetrable mystery. That’s how I felt, at least. Goddamn, though, because she took my hand on the way home. Held it and smiled at me when she did it. I remember that now, too, but not how I screwed it up later on.
Nicholas Mainieri, “Mercy”
(via dannygoodmanwriting)
Amazing new #fiction from @fwrictionreview contributor Nicholas Mainieri (http://goo.gl/bcHVl2). Go get it, right now. It’s that good.
Buildings, businesses, whole communities sprang up seemingly overnight, then were torn down to make way for their successors, as if living out some myth of endless progress, of clear title to reshape the world day to day.
…the writer’s ultimate concentration should be on the blanket, not on what’s underneath it. What writing can do uniquely, I think, is show us fundamental human tendencies, and the ways these tendencies lead to suffering…
George Saunders, “Choose Your Own Adventure” (via dannygoodmanwriting)
“The Day the Aliens Came (Hawaiian Feeling)” by The Mountain Goats, chosen by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, author of “Invasion from Planet Z-4000,” for our Waffle-Rocking Playlist
Fiction is not just a genre: It’s a way of inhabiting. It’s an attempt to wrestle away language from the traditional bastions of power from writer to writer, book to book, and have it transform us. It’s a way of understanding our world.
Krys Lee on why fiction matters, “The Invention of the Self Is Another Kind of Fiction” (via @centerforfiction)