"Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good"
In Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde’s What We Owe, translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Jane Clark Wessel and forthcoming with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a fifty-year-old Iranian refugee living in Sweden revisits the choices of her past after discovering she has only six months to live.
The day I was born, I was a disappointment. I was the sixth girl in a family with no sons. I was not what my parents had hoped for. But I wasn’t the biggest disappointment. When Noora was...
Writers not writing for a living often find enjoyment and small payouts from Web sites seeking material to raise their sites higher in the search engine rankings. Although this is a legitimate practice, the writing being published on the Web can often be less than professional. This lack of professionalism distorts the line between qualified and amateur writers. Writing standards are often not the highest priority as Web sites seek to drive traffic to gain advertising exposure. It seems as if readers are not as concerned about the writing quality, as long as they find a relevant account on a particular topic.