Update on TCR Story of the Month Author Edward McWhinney

Edward McWhinney

Edward McWhinney, the talented Irish writer whose story "To Ipswich" was TCR Story of the Month for June, has three new stories published --

"On a Barge," a brief and searing portrait of man in an existential crisis, in Contrary (Summer 2012)

"After Mass," a work of creative non-fiction exploring an individual's place in the scheme of things, in Word Riot (August 2012)

"Adrift in the Ghetto," a mesmerizing tale of a stranger trying to find his bearings in an alien city, in Juked (8 November 2012)

TCR Story of the Month series locates and links to some of the best new fiction published online.

The Committee Room.  Interesting Articles for Interested Readers.  Since 2011.

TCR Story of the Month (Classic) for October: Paul's Case by Willa Cather

Willa Cather, 1905 (courtesy of U. of Nebraska)

The Committee Room departs from its presentation of the best in contemporary fiction to offer a classic story, Willa Cather's "Paul's Case," as TCR Story of the Month for October.

"Paul's Case" has been called "a small masterpiece of sustained tone" and a story "justly admired for its narrative skill and its psychological portraiture."

The story of an opera and theater loving Pittsburgh youth who makes a desperate escape from the reality of his ordinary lower middle class life, "Paul's Case" was the seventh and last story in Cather's first collection of stories, The Troll Garden, published in 1905. All of the stories in The Troll Garden deal with art and artists. Soon after the collection's publication, "Paul's Case" reached a wider audience when it was reprinted in McClure's Magazine, a leading general interest magazine.

Writers on Time Magazine Covers

Joseph Conrad, 1923

The Committee Room looks at how literature has been treated by the mainstream American media as we take an accounting of the literary figures deemed notable enough for Time to put them on its cover.

Time was founded by two young Yale graduates -- bon vivant Briton Hadden and sober-minded Henry Luce -- with the aim of keeping the "busy man" well informed. Its first issue appeared on March 3, 1923. On the cover was elderly former Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon, an Illinois Republican who was retiring from his Congressional seat after a record breaking number of years in office.

Time's first author cover came early on. The cover of its sixth issue, published on April 7, 1923, offered a sketch portrait of Joseph Conrad. The accompanying article -- a few paragraphs about Conrad making his first visit to the United States -- was without a byline since all Time articles were supposed to be a collaborative effort of the staff, a practice the magazine continued for many decades.

TCR Spotlight on Theater: Wendy Wasserstein

The Committee Room recently spoke with Julie Salamon whose widely praised biography of the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein -- Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein -- was just released in paperback. Salamon is a journalist who has worked for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Her 1992 book The Devil's Candy, an examination of the making of the screen version of Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, is a classic look at behind the scenes Hollywood.

Salamon came to the Wasserstein biography at the suggestion of her editor at Penguin who had been approached by a close friend of Wasserstein, Andre Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. Bishop serves as literary executor for Wasserstein's work including her best known play The Heidi Chronicles which won both the Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1989. Bishop realized that a biography of Wasserstein, who died in 2006, was inevitable and wanted the project done properly.

TCR Story of the Month for September: How to Adopt a Cat by Dave K.

Dave K. 

The Committee Room is pleased to present "How to Adopt a Cat" by Dave K. as TCR Story of the Month for September.

Set in a steampunk world, "How to Adopt a Cat" follows a friendless man on his release from an insane asylum. With superbly rendered detail, this intense, offbeat story delves into the mind of a desperate character on the margins of life.

Dave K. is a writer and artist who lives in Baltimore. His work has been published in Front Porch Journal, Battered Suitcase, LOOP, Artichoke Haircut, and Welter, and he self-publishes through Banners of Death Press. A collection of his stories is Stone a Pig (2012). When he’s not writing, Dave K. is a valley on the southern side of Windwhistle Peak, in the Allan Hills.

TCR Forgotten Pulitzer Series: His Family (1918) by Ernest Poole

First edition, 1917

The Committee Room continues its TCR Forgotten Pulitzer Series with His Family by Ernest Poole, winner of the first Pulitzer Prize in the best novel category. Published in 1917 and given the award in 1918, His Family tells the story of Roger Gale, an aging widower coping with life and trying to keep his family together in rapidly changing Manhattan of the early twentieth century. A New Hampshire Yankee who moved to New York as a young man in the Gilded Age, Roger -- the owner of a news clipping agency -- now finds his single-family, gaslit home surrounded by massive apartment buildings wired with electricity. Motor cars are replacing horse-drawn wagons. Most importantly, the city teems with Catholic and Jewish immigrants and their children. Roger comes to terms with the idea that these newcomers will soon dominate New York, a new kind of New York, and perhaps a better one.

His Family was originally published by Macmillan. The dust jacket of the first edition, depicting the New York skyline dwarfing smaller older homes, was by E.C. Caswell, a leading illustrator. Larry James Gianakos, writing in PPrize.com says the His Family wrapper "may well have been Caswell's masterpiece...a work of great art in and of itself."

TCR Literary Journals Series: The Journal (Ohio State University)

The Committee Room is excited about continuing its Literary Journals Series with a look at The Journal, Ohio State University's venerable literary magazine. Founded as The Ohio Journal in 1973 by the Ohio State English department, The Journal, a quarterly which publishes its Winter and Summer issues in print and its Spring and Fall issues online, specializes in longer stories, excerpts from novels, and writing not easily classified by genre. Robert Duffer of New Pages says that "the patience The Journal provides its writers - and readers - gives it a traditional sense of authority, one that endures."

The Journal was edited from 1985 to1990 by poet David Citino and was then co-edited for many years by novelist and essayist Michelle Herman and poet Kathy Fagan.  In recent years it has become a student-run publication with editorial positions changing hands annually.