July 8, 2010 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Review of P.F. Kluge's new novel A Call from Jersey

Jul 08 2010

Patrick Chura is associate professor of English at the University of Akron and author of Vital Contact: Downclassing Journeys in American Literature from Melville to Richard Wright. His second book, Thoreau the Land Surveyor, is forthcoming in 2010. He recently returned to Lithuania as a Fulbright lecturer. Here he reviews P.F. Kluge’s new novel that is coming out this September. • A Call from Jersey by P. F. Kluge (Micronesia 1967-69) Overlook Press 352 pages $25.95 September 2010 Reviewed by Patrick Chura (Lithuania 1992-94) IN A CALL FROM JERSEY, P. F. Kluge isn’t out to write an epic or a blockbuster. He’s trying instead for a quiet, emotionally intelligent book about sentiments real to all of us. The main characters in this thoughtful novel are Hans Greifinger, an aging German immigrant who came to the United States in 1928, and his Americanized son George Griffin, a baby boomer who is . . .

Finding A Job In Publishing: Literary Agent #6

Jul 08 2010

It has been said that you must be short to be an agent. Not true. If you love books, have a comfortable shoulder on which writers can cry on, can generate ideas and see trends in what readers want to read and learn about, and if you like to be taken out to expensive luncheons paid for by editors, then you might want to think about being an agent. Again, you have to start at the bottom of the food chain as an assistant and do a lot of crappy jobs. The typical tasks of an agent’s assistant is to read and evaluate manuscripts; submit manuscripts to publishers, handle contracts, checks, and royalty statements; write permission with pitch letters; and handle the boss’s schedule, phone, and expenses. The way to get a job as an agent’s assistant is to move to New York City, read mediabistro.com and the half dozen other on-line websites that . . .

Archive - July 8, 2010