By Edward Nawotka The year 2011 marks the end of a busy decade for Boston-based novelist David Schmahmann. It was a period that he spent thinking, exploring and writing a great deal about his birthplace…South Africa. The decade was bookended by the publication of two seminal books about the country: 2001’s John Gardner Book Award-winning Empire Settings, a drama about the relationship …
“The Best Tool Available”: Portugal’s José Rodrigues dos Santos on Truth vs. Fiction
• José Rodrigues dos Santos, one of Portugal’s best known journalists and novelists, discusses the relationship between truth and fiction. • “If I was doing journalism, I should tell the truth, right?” he posits, only to reveal that sometimes fiction is, indeed, “the best tool available” — the proverbial lie that tells the actual truth. By José Rodrigues dos Santos LISBON: …
Bonus Material: How to Finish Your Novel
By Edward Nawotka Tim Hallinan learned the hard way about finishing a novel. Before becoming a published novelist, as he explains on his website, he had started three novels, but finished none of them, when his house burned down, destroying all of his manuscripts. “Naturally,” he writes, “I had backups of all my unfinished novels, and naturally, they were all in …