News related to Life Is Short – Art Is Shorter

by David ShieldsElizabeth Cooperman

[REVIEW] Life is Short – Art is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity, edited by David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman

28 Sep 2015|

Review by Dinty W. Moore

Life Is Short Reviews Itself

[An assemblage of sentences lifted, Shields-style, from Life is Short – Art is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity.]

Objects are real. Details matter—to the devil and to everyone else, including and especially writers. It was assumed that I would have a fedora hat of my own by the time I was twelve years old. In honor of the hybrid spirit of the form, stage your prose poem in such a way that you get at what is to you one of life’s crucial...Forward

Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter: The TNB Self-Interview

10 Apr 2015|

This self- interview is answered by voices from the anthology Life is Short—Art is Shorter by David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman.


How would you describe the brief selections in this book?

“ …ticks engorged like grapes” (Amy Hempel, “Weekend”)


What were you thinking about when you put this collection together?

“I was thinking about my body’s small, precise, limited, hungry movement forward…” (Wayne Koestenbaum, “My 1980s”)


You have said that Brevity...Forward

Excerpt of Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter, by David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman by The Nervous Breakdown

10 Apr 2015|

Introduction

Short Stuff

Bobs, tempers, college rejection letters, kinds of love, postcards, nicknames, baby carrots, myopia, life flashing before eyes, gummy bears, the loser’s straw, Capri pants, charge on this phone battery, a moment on the lips (forever on the hips), caprice, velvet chokers, six months to live, penne, some dog tails, how long I’ve known you though it feels like a lifetime, even a complicated dive, tree stumps, a shot of tequila, breaking a bone, a temp job, bobby...Forward

“50 Books of Literary Collage,” by Elizabeth Cooperman and David Shields presented by Powell’s Books

06 Apr 2015|

We cowrote and coedited Life Is Short — Art Is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity. We’re interested in brief prose (short-shorts and mini-essays), but we’re also (and even more) devoted to book-length works of literary collage, built out of brief shards. Here are some of our favorite examples of such works.
– David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman

÷ ÷ ÷

Speedboat by Renata Adler
David learned how to write by reading this book until the spine broke. He typed the entire book twice.


OR: The...Forward

Life Is Short—Art Is Shorter‘s 40 contributors include Donald Barthelme, Kate Chopin, Lydia Davis, Annie Dillard, Jonathan Safran Foer, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Jamaica Kincaid, Wayne Koestenbaum, Anne Lamott, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody, Dinty W. Moore, George Orwell, Jayne Anne Phillips, George Saunders, Lauren Slater, James Tate, and Paul Theroux. This is not just the first anthology to gather both mini-essays and short-short stories; readers, writers, and teachers will get will get an...Forward

Caleb Powell’s Arguments Worth Having: Interviews/Conversations includes Hawthorne authors: Poe Ballantine, Gregory Martin, Frank Meeink, David Shields, and Lidia Yuknavitch

25 Sep 2014|

Caleb Powell is a writer, teacher and family man who lives in Seattle.

To read his interviews with Hawthorne authors and Eula Biss. Andie Trosper DeRoux, Saadia Haq, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Ander Monson, Peter Mountford, and Jervey Tervalon, go to Arguments Worth Having.

Life is Short – Art is Shorter is a sustained argument for the excitement and urgency of literary brevity in a digital, post-religious age and an analysis and embodiment of how different literary gestures are related to different stages of a person’s life. It’s not just the first anthology to gather both mini-essays and short-short stories; readers, writers, and teachers will get an anthology; a course’s worth of writing exercises; a rally for compression, concision, and velocity; and a...Forward