Content Tagged ‘Molly Antopol’

In this week’s Roundup, we’re playing a game of quotable contributors! In this game, everybody wins. From envy to Donald Trump to marriage, Ecotone and Lookout authors are talking about all sorts of things on the Internet this week. Here are our favorite morsels to challenge and inspire you.

Ecotone contributor Molly Antopol has a conversation with Sophie McManus over at Pixelated. Sophie asks how Molly gets inside her character’s heads and she says, “It’s much easier for me to write about the things I’m really upset about, terrified of, etc. when I can look at them through the lens of someone very different from myself. Basically my sweet spot in writing is cranky, middle-aged Jewish men. But nothing in writing comes easily for me, unfortunately! These stories took FOREVER.”

Ecotone contributor John Jeremiah Sullivan has a conversation over at Chapter 16 with Susannah Felts. Asked about if the topics and people he’s written about in the past pop back of for him, he replies: “All subjects come back, both to haunt and to goad you. The best ones do it the most. That’s one of the ways you recognize them. By best, I mean the subjects that trouble you in a deep enough way to sustain you.”

Ecotone contributor Sarah Manguso takes on envy in her author’s note in the New York Times. Smartly putting things in perspective, she says, “The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison.”

Lookout author Steve Almond, always ready with the most helpful advice, has some hilarious tips in the Boston Globe for talking to your kids when they inevitably bring up Donald Trump. “Remember that your child has not yet learned to draw a clear line between fantasy and reality. She may not understand the difference between the monsters encountered in fairytales and the bloated, orange-faced creature bellowing polls numbers at her on the television.”

Ecotone contributor Delaney Nolan has a story up on Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading. Here’s one of the characters on his marriage: “Natalie and I used to fight a lot, before. Regular marriage fights—I pretend to laugh too often; she criticizes me too much. I wouldn’t say we had issues, but we’d gotten married in our twenties, and after two decades together even our thinnest problems had had time to accumulate into thicker, heavier ones, like stacks of plastic transparencies that eventually stop being transparent. But when the sand started to come up and cover everything and everybody, the fighting sort of died off.”

We hope these quotables have given you something to think about, and we hope your week ahead is filled with all sorts of inspiration things you can’t wait to write down. Oh, and if you’re looking for more inspiration, don’t forget to follow Ecotone (@ecotonemagazine) and Lookout (@lookoutbooksuncw) on Instagram!

Our new series, Fact Check, is just what it sounds like: in it, Ecotone editors and staffers offer a glimpse into the world of the literary fact check. This first essay comes from managing editor Katie O’Reilly, who fact-checked Molly Antopol’s “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story,” which was reprinted in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015.  

Ever fantasized about building a time-travel machine and careening backward through history? If so I highly advise trying the poor (wo)man’s alternative: fact-checking a work of historical fiction. Triple that recommendation if you’re lucky enough to land a story assignment as rich, riveting, and significant as Molly Antopol’s “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story”—the Holocaust-era tale of escape that kicked off Ecotone 16, the Migration Issue.

The story, an excerpt from Antopol’s The UnAmericans, traces 13-year-old Raya, a Jew living in Belarus and working at a “uniform factory,” and her illicit escape from her Nazi-occupied native village. Her travels through a network of sewers, and her inadvertent arrival at the forested work-camp site of a faction of the subversive “Yiddish Underground,” is revealed by current-day Raya, a Brooklyn-based grandma. She tells her curious granddaughter, a contemporary twenty-something, all about helping the camp’s young anarchists to build weapons, sneaking into nearby villages to rob peasants, and scheming to dislodge rail lines serving German policemen—all to attack Nazi soldiers. Raya also relays the story of her migration to the United States. Following a violent coup, Raya and the leader of the forest revolutionaries, fifteen-year-old Leon Moskowitz, attempt to immigrate to Palestine. However, they miss the quota and are instead loaded onto a boat to the States, where they marry and have a family, and where Leon becomes a career delivery driver for a beer distributor.

Fiction can be a tricky nut to fact-check, as its very definition lends authors prerogative to write whatever they please. Editors are not (or should not be) in the business of cross-examining anyone’s imagination or psyche; however, especially when a story’s setting depends upon such a loaded, complex, and recent period of history as this one, our credibility is on the line.

We’re finishing up the first full week of school at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, the home of Lookout and Ecotone, and are gearing up for a semester of literary action! We’re just a little over a week away from the release of Lookout’s debut novel, and we’ve got news and events aplenty:

Looking for a book job with a view beyond the Empire State Building? Bustle rounded up some of our peer indie presses from across the country. Like us, they’re championing unique and original voices that may have been eschewed, or were not the right fit, for the big five. Glad to see two of our Southern favorites in the mix: John F. Blair Publisher in Winston-Salem, NC (our distributor), and Hub City Press in Spartanburg, SC.

Speaking of indie presses, our publisher, Emily Louise Smith, will give a presentation at the Pamlico Writers Conference this weekend on the role of independents in the current book publishing landscape. If you missed it on Facebook, check out Pamlico’s interview with Emily.

We loved meeting all of the smart, dedicated booksellers at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute in Asheville last week. Thanks to everyone who came to our NC Speakeasy, joined us for the rep picks lunches, and added Lookout’s debut novel, Honey from the Lion, to your tote bags. If you weren’t able to snag a galley, please e-mail us.

Four years after the collapse of Borders, “Independents are looking at adding locations and taking back some of the physical bookshelf space that had been lost,” writes Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly. We couldn’t be happier to read about the ongoing resurgence.

Speaking of bookstores, this “carousel of light” just opened in the heart of Bucharest. Read on to discover six beautiful floors of more than 10,000 books. The space will also host cultural events and concerts.

After a long hiatus, we’re finally back with our weekly Lit News Roundup.

Hearty congratulations are in order for several Ecotone contributors:

Shawn Vestal recently won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for his story collection, Godforsaken Idaho, and we couldn’t be prouder that two of the stories in the book, “Winter Elders” and “Opposition In All Things,” first appeared in the pages of Ecotone. “Winter Elders” also has a home in our best of Ecotone fiction anthology, Astoria to Zion.

And Ecotone 16 contributor Molly Antopol’s stunning story collection, The UnAmericans, made the 2014 longlist for the National Book Award in Fiction. You can read “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story” in full on the Ecotone website.

As always in our weekly Lit News, we round up the headlines and vital discussions in literature and publishing arts, and also announce Lookout and Ecotone author kudos.

Emma Straub suggested “Ten Books To Read If You’re Not Traveling This Summer” for Publishers Weekly and included at #3 Arcadia by Lauren Groff, who has a story in Astoria to Zion.

More than dudes in tights or self-indulgent autobiography: at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Anne Elizabeth Moore considers journalistic nonfiction comics from California, Iceland, and Japan.

Ben Miller, author of last year’s debut memoir in essays, River Bend Chronicle, has been selected as one of Radcliffe’s 2014–15 fellows and will have a year at Harvard’s institute for advanced study to shape a manuscript extending his investigation of the urban Midwest. Congratulations, Ben!

Last night at One Story’s annual Literary Debutante Ball in Brooklyn, two Ecotone contributors made their book debuts. Congrats to Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans, and Ben Stroud, author of Byzantium. We hope you both did it up last night! 

Happy Valentine’s Day! While most of us are romantics at heart, we’d just like to point out that we don’t need a special day show love for Lookout authors and Ecotone contributors. Fridays are dedicated author roundups but know this: we love you every day.

A few author happenings you might find interesting:

Lookout author Steve Almond explains the goodness of bad writing in his latest post for The Writer’s Notebook, AWP’s blog.

Astoria to Zion contributor Miha Mazzini’s Crumbs, the best-ever selling novel in Yugoslavia, is being republished. The Skinny speaks with him here about “navigating self-determination” and claims that this new publication “could prove more timely than ever.”