The Buzz

I’ve told author/reviewer Eric Miles Williamson a million times to lay off the hyperbole. (That’s my favorite hyperbole joke.) Williamson’s review of Richard Lange’s short story collection Dead Boys is so overwhelmingly positive, it seems too good to be true. The review begins with a bleak assessment of the short story market:

There are probably more “writers” of short stories than there are readers of them, far more submissions than subscribers, all those would-be writers scrambling around trying to get published in literary quarterlies no one reads…

Yikes. Williamson then ladles the praise on Dead Boys:

Stylistically brilliant, painfully and truly observed and rendered, “Dead Boys” is not just one of the best collections thus far this decade: “Dead Boys” is one of the best short story collections of the past 50 years

Dead Boys has been in my to be read stack for a few weeks. This review just bumped it up to the top of the pile. See. Reviews do matter.

Speaking of reviews, author Lionel Shriver is one of many to heap praise on Amy Bloom’s Away.

Lastly, the San Francisco Chronicle has a preview of all of the buzz worthy books coming this fall (Chabon! Roth! Junot Diaz! Patchett! Something called An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England!) You better start making a dent in that to be read stack.  It’s not going to get any smaller.

• 

  By Beth (The Toronto One), August 24, 2007 @ 8:20 am

  “Literary quarterlies no one reads.”

  That hurts. And, yes, it may be true, but it still hurts.

  Sigh.

• 

  By Frank, August 24, 2007 @ 12:55 pm

  Shay-bone!

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