Share and Share Alike
Tom Grimes, SWT’s director of the M.F.A. and creative writing programs, finds himself sharing Hyperion editor Leigh Haber with Karen Stolz, who currently teaches rhetoric at St. Ed’s and literature at ACC. That’s good news for Stolz because Haber told Grimes that she came up with the idea for the book he’s writing for Hyperion, which is an anthology and history of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, because she was seeing so little fiction that inspired her. “It’s true that I think that great fiction is entirely too rare a find as an editor or as a reader for that matter,” Haber says, “and it did occur to me … that that bastion of great American fiction writing … should have a volume celebrating its rich legacy.”As for that too-rare fiction Haber looks for, Stolz’sWorld of Pies apparently fit the bill — it’s a chrono-logical series of short stories set in fictional Annette, Texas, that will be published in fall 1999 or spring 2000. By the time it’s printed, though, World of Pies may be a novel, since Haber has proposed that the stories could relatively easily be made into a novel. “It’s very close to being a novel anyway,” Stolz says, “but a novel has one defining moment whereas this collection has several.” For Stolz, how the cover defines the book may not matter; this is how she approaches her own reading: “As long as I like what I’m reading, I don’t care what they call it.”…
I’ll be brief mentioning that an advance copy of Michener Center director Jim Magnuson‘s new book Windfall just arrived at the Chronicle (it will be out in March) because publishers tend to come down here from New York and slowly remove one finger for every pre-publication mention of a book. It’s a thriller about a broke assistant English professor at UT who has a family to support; he just happens to come across seven coolers of cash under a deserted feed store. Mary Willis Walker says that Windfall is “the thinking man’s thriller — if you think you’re too smart to get trapped in terror, read it and sweat.”…
SWT and the Michener Center may start sharing the high caliber authors both institutions bring to town. Tom Jones, who’s coming next spring, will read at both SWT and UT, for example. “I don’t think either one of us sees the programs as competitive. There’s a lot of room for companionship actually, sharing the wealth of both programs,” Grimes says…
Correcting last week’s news that Marion Winik is moving to an emu farm in rural Pennsylvania, her fianc� doesn’t actually own the farm, he just lives on it…
On Sunday, November 15, 6pm, BookWoman hosts its second annual Turning the Tables, an “alternative thanksgiving and benefit” for the store. Local and national authors like Winik, Sharon Bridgforth, Sarah Bentley, K. Bradford, Frances Nail, and Cindy Huyser are going to cook for the event and read from their works. And just how does a business throw a benefit for itself? Apparently, you just do it. “As a local independent feminist bookstore, we need money. We’re an endangered species,” Sue Burns, BookWoman bookseller, says. It’s $28 to attend or $24 for students; call 472-2785 for tickets…
If listening to all those authors this weekend at the Texas Book Festival gets to be too much, visit the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ free exhibition, 50 Books/50 Covers, at the lower rotunda of the Capitol. 50 Books/50 Covers is the result of AIGA’s annual juried competition of book and cover design, the premier U.S. judgingof book design excellence. Every year, the exhibition is donated to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia, but before it heads there, AIGA’s national office in New York has loaned it to the Austin chapter for the Festival.
This article appears in November 13 • 1998 and November 13 • 1998 (Cover).