Well, I did it again: led the Seven-Sentence Short Story workshop (created by science fiction and fantasy author James van Pelt) at a writing conference, this time, Wordbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta. Here’s the story I …
It’s time for this year’s Kickstarter to fund Shapers of Worlds Volume V, the fifth in the series of anthologies featuring science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The …
It takes money to publish books, and most of that money flows out the door before the book is released and sales begin, so my publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, is turning to Crowdfundr to help …
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, the fourth anthology featuring authors who were guests on my podcast, The Worldshapers, is now available everywhere, including directly from Shadowpaw Press. Here’s a handy universal URL with links to …
My publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, has three great titles coming out in the first two months of 2024, all of them science fiction or fantasy. The first two, The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv and …
Here’s another seven-sentence short story! I ran the workshop again at Ganbatte, an anime convention in Saskatoon. It went well, and here’s the one I created, again with the instructions, created by noted SF short-story …
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Barbarians at the gate!
“‘He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls’…That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.'” Harold Bloom, self-appointed arbiter of what does and does not have literary value, commenting on the fact that the National Book Awards is planning to give its annual medal for distinguished contribution to American letters to Stephen King. No sign of an inventive human intelligence in Stephen King? I submit there are more signs of an inventive human intelligence in the average King story than in many whole books of so-called literary fiction. After all, what inventiveness is required to recount in tortured prose the deadly dull details of a middle-aged man’s mid-life crisis, particularly if you are a middle-aged man undergoing a mid-life crisis? If Mr. Bloom’s mind were closed any tighter, it would implode.
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2003/09/barbarians-at-the-gate/
