"Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes. "
Today's suggestions come from Pamela Ryder:In the Year of Long Division, by Dawn Raffel
This amazing collection of stories should not be missed. With language
as clear and crisp as the dawning of a clear new day, the characters
reveal themselves and the workings of their most mysterious hearts. Nightwork, by Christine Schutt Death,
loss, love are rendered to perfection in this collection of exquisite
stories. Motives are revealed, not by explanation, but by the exacting
language of intimacy and daring. Pamela Ryder is the author of Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories (FC 2, 2008), and the forthcoming short story collection, A Tendency to be Gone (Dzanc Books, 2011) and has had her stories widely published in literary journals, including The Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Conjunctions, The Texas Review, and Quarterly West.
Recently, the writer and neurologist Alice W. Flaherty has argued that literary creativity is a function of specific areas of the brain, and that writer's block may be the result of brain activity being disrupted in those areas.