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One of my favorite pastimes is guessing which celebrities and public figures are going to be next in the publishing queue. Maybe some day, I can get Vegas to start setting odds on my little parlor gam. So this morning, I’m wondering how long it will be for University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari [...]

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Scott and I have been discussing the Mike Daisey fiasco and something stuck out for me during his This American Life interview and, more important, in the reactions by various tech visionaries at various online outlets. “He’s a liar,” they said. “He’s a fraud.” “Me made us care about something that wasn’t true.” While I [...]

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[Editor's Note: In honor of the upcoming Halloween holiday, I turned to novelist and horror aficionado Stephen Graham Jones to make some recommendations on ten frightening books. He's a prolific writer whose All the Beautiful Sinners was recently re-released as an e-book by Dzanc Books. So stock up on some Jones and also check out [...]

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The sports world has been brewing with furor over bestselling author Jeff Pearlman’s new book Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton. Enraged by an excerpt in Sports Illustrated that painted the legendary Chicago Bears running back as beset with addictions, infidelities, and affairs, the sports nation rose up in ire against Pearlman. Most of [...]

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With the news that Amanda Knox has been released from Italian prison, you just have to wonder how long it’s going to take before the book deals start flooding in. There are already Candace Dempsey’s Murder in Italy: The Shocking Slaying of a British Student, the Accused American Girl, and anInternational Scandal which was released [...]

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Reality television star and former Hugh Hefner consort Holly Madison is getting a tremendous amount of attention for the fact that she insured her breasts for $1 million. Which, to my mind, is kind of like Rebecca Black insuring her Auto-Tuned voice. Both are synthetic, manufactured, and more the product of other people’s skill than [...]

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As we work out the kinks in our new theme here at Slushpile.net, we’ve noticed that there is an error in that the category links are not pulling all the entries. For example, if you click on the Interviews link on the right, it only displays five results when, in fact, we’ve posted dozens and [...]

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It’s not every day that you turn to a novel for household cleaning tips. Maybe you look at a periodical like Good Housekeeping or you flip through a nonfiction reference book. But then again, it’s not every day that your home turns into a crime scene. Luckily, crime is a rarity in the exclusive confines [...]

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Our benefactor, John Biggs, is pleased to announce our first web course featuring one-on-one time with him online during the run of the program. It’s a 12-week writing course with a focus on blogging and it should take you 20 minutes or so a day to go through the sections, videos, exercises and discussions.

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Please pardon our dust as we undergo some construction here at Slushpile.net. As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, we’ve installed a new theme and will be working out the kinks in the coming days. But we have some cool interviews coming up so be sure to check back regularly. Thanks for reading!

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Since we’ve been discussing music-related books, I thought I might mention a cool new album that’s been in heavy rotation during my writing periods lately. Hadden Sayers is a Texas-born bluesman currently residing in the Midwest. Armed with a battered but cherished ’57 Stratocaster, he performs with his own band as well as backing up [...]

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In 2001, in his debut book Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota Chuck Klosterman wrote “I mean, nobody literate cares about metal, right?” Obviously, Klosterman himself didn’t think that metal was unworthy of literary examination and he plowed ahead with the book that set the foundation for his successful career. [...]

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In honor of National Short Story Month, I’m thinking about Mark Richard’s “The Birds for Christmas.” I recently finished Richard’s new memoir House of Prayer No 2 and some of the scenes in there are clearly familiar to anyone who had read “The Birds.” My first experience with this great short story came from Mark [...]

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I’ve been in full-time nonfiction mode recently. So what little reading I’ve been able to do has been of the factual variety. But I’ve been longing to dive back into made up worlds. And National Short Story Month provides the perfect excuse to revisit some old favorites and to hopefully discover some new voices that [...]

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