March 22, 2010, NOTE: The winners have been announced here.

March 10, 2010, NOTE: See list of nine finalists here.

March 8, 2010, NOTE: Voting round closed. See list of twenty semifinalists here.

March 1, 2010, NOTE: Nominations are now closed. Go here to see the list of nominees, and vote.

February 22, 2010, NOTE: Nominations are now open.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

In May of last year we announced that we would start awarding four sets of prizes every year (on the two solstices and the two equinoxes) for the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature. We awarded the science prizes, judged by Steven Pinker, on June 21, and then announced the winners of the philosophy prizes, judged by Daniel C. Dennett, on September 22. This was followed by the politics prizes, judged by Tariq Ali, for which the winners were announced on December 21. We are now going to do the Arts and Literature Prizes, and here's how it will work: we will soon begin accepting nominations for this prize. After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this period, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, who, we are extremely pleased, has agreed to be the final judge.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.

* * *

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.)

* * *

Details:

The winners of the Arts & Literature Prize will be announced on March 20, 2010. Here's the schedule:

February 22:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite blog entry by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
• Blog posts longer than 4,000 words are not eligible.
• We will accept poems and fiction, as well as book or art reviews, criticism, and other types of writing about arts or literature.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been written after February 21, 2009.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 200 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.
• You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, of course!

February 28, 2010

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
• The public voting will be opened immediately afterwards.

March 7, 2010

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

March 22, 2010

• The winners are announced.

And another Mini-Contest!

For each of our contests, I have asked designer friends of mine to produce “trophy” logos that the winners of that prize can display on their own blogs. You can see all of them here. I am now running out of designer friends, so here is an offer: send me your design for a logo for the winners of the Arts & Literature Prize (it must contain the same info as in the examples I have linked to, and the size is 160 X 350 pixels), and if I use it, I'll send you $25. Try. It'll be fun. Deadline: March 10, 2010.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

In many of O’Connor’s best stories, “Parker’s Back” prominent among them, the religious theme is so subtly dramatized that it can be overlooked by casual readers unaware of the author’s larger purpose. Whatever else her fiction is, it is not Catholic propaganda.6 In the end, though, a critical approach that denies or downplays O’Connor’s faith will necessarily result in only a partial appreciation of her work. It is no more possible to understand a book like Wise Blood without taking Catholicism seriously—if only to reject it—than it is possible to understand the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer without taking Judaism seriously. The difference, of course, is that Singer viewed religion with reluctant skepticism, O’Connor with unswerving certitude. As I once wrote in these pages: O’Connor’s Christ-haunted characters differ profoundly from Singer’s demon-infested Jews. In O’Connor, unbelievers living in a fallen world tainted by modernity suddenly find themselves irradiated by grace, but, like Hazel Motes . . . they struggle in vain against its revelatory power. In Singer’s world, by contrast, there are no sudden revelations, only the unquenchable desire to believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that life has meaning.7

more from Terry Teachout at Commentary here.

You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o’clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. At first, your family is brave and supportive, and although you’re in shock, you convince yourself that you were ready for something new. Then you start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. You can’t stop picturing the face of the employee who was deputized to give you the bad news. He does not look like George Clooney. You have fantasies of terrible things happening to him, to your boss, to George Clooney. You find—a novel recognition—not only that you have no sex drive but that you don’t care. You react irritably when friends advise you to let go and move on. After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?

more from Louis Menand at The New Yorker here.

“Never in my life have I taken first place”, muses the narrator of Kamennyi most (The Stone Bridge), as he lines up his toy soldiers on a flea market stall in Moscow on a quiet autumn Sunday in 1998. Such is the opening of Alexander Terekhov’s 832-page novel, last year’s most talked-about work of fiction in Russia which took second prize in the Big Book awards. A graduate of the Journalism Faculty of the Moscow University (like many of the leading literary figures of his generation), Terekhov, who was born in 1966, began his career as an essayist and journalist. He published his first novel, Krysoboi, in 1995 (it came out in English as The Rat Killer in 2008). Kamennyi most is his second, and so far it exists only in Russian. Greeted with mixed and sometimes muddled reviews but always acknowledged as compelling, Kamennyi most takes its title from Moscow’s Bolshoy Kamennyi most, or Great Stone Bridge, the site of the murder mystery at the centre of the novel. The bridge’s single span connects the two banks of the Moscow River in the heart of the capital. On one bank stands the residential apartment complex for high Soviet officials – a brooding Constructivist giant of the 1930s, echoing the Lenin Mausoleum which was the setting for Yuri Trifonov’s novel The House on the Embankment (1976). The other bank is dominated by the Kremlin, a medieval fortress in Gothic style, the seat of the “Emperor”, as Terekhov’s narrator calls Joseph Stalin.

more from Gregory Freidin at the TLS here.

Pears

…The pears are not seen
…as the observer wills
………….Wallace Stevens

1
Sometimes they are pears.
At other times sirens in a basket.
And not so often, violins
one tunes with a stem.

2
Pears hold their heads up high
they have cello-shaped waists and
curvy hips.
Buddha adapted their way of sitting
in order to reside inside
nothingness.

3
The pears are dressed in a green suit
with red pockets.
The poets among them wear
a felt fedora with a leaf.

4
Their single hair jumps to attention
or curves like a whip, raised against
the clay-ness of the bowl, the
pressing of fingers,
of teeth.

5
The great communist painter,
Pablo Picasso, framed them into
cubes.
With lopped heads they resemble
their common bretheren, the apples.

6
Their shadow is like sudden
excitement,
a breathtaking leap that ends
in disenchantment:
the murmur of the stem, the echo of
the leaf.

by Shai Dotan

from On the Verge;
publisher: Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 2005
translation:Ohad Stadler, 2008

From rosaparks.org:

Rosa Louise Parks was nationally recognized as the “mother of the modern day civil rights movement” in America. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest December 5, 1955 that reverberated throughout the United States. Her quiet courageous act changed America, its view of black people and redirected the course of history.

Mrs. Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley, February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. She was the first child of James and Leona Edwards McCauley. Her brother, Sylvester McCauley, now deceased, was born August 20, 1915. Later, the family moved to Pine Level, Alabama where Rosa was reared and educated in the rural school. When she completed her education in Pine Level at age eleven, her mother, Leona, enrolled her in Montgomery Industrial School for Girls (Miss White's School for Girls), a private institution. After finishing Miss White's School, she went on to Alabama State Teacher's College High School. She, however, was unable to graduate with her class, because of the illness of her grandmother Rose Edwards and later her death.

As Rosa Parks prepared to return to Alabama State Teacher's College, her mother also became ill, therefore, she continued to take care of their home and care for her mother while her brother, Sylvester, worked outside of the home. She received her high school diploma in 1934, after her marriage to Raymond Parks, December 18, 1932. Raymond, now deceased was born in Wedowee, Alabama, Randolph County, February 12, 1903, received little formal education due to racial segregation. He was a self-educated person with the assistance of his mother, Geri Parks. His immaculate dress and his thorough knowledge of domestic affairs and current events made most think he was college educated. He supported and encouraged Rosa's desire to complete her formal education.

More here.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Suppose, as some experts advise, that the new national dietary guidelines due this spring will lower the recommended level of salt. Suppose further that public health officials in New York and Washington succeed in forcing food companies to use less salt. What would be the effect?

A) More than 44,000 deaths would be prevented annually (as estimated recently in The New England Journal of Medicine).

B) About 150,000 deaths per year would be prevented annually (as estimated by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene).

C) Hundreds of millions of people would be subjected to an experiment with unpredictable and possibly adverse effects (as argued recently in The Journal of the American Medical Association).

D) Not much one way or the other.

E) Americans would get even fatter than they are today.

Don’t worry, there’s no wrong answer, at least not yet. That’s the beauty of the salt debate: there’s so little reliable evidence that you can imagine just about any outcome. For all the talk about the growing menace of sodium in packaged foods, experts aren’t even sure that Americans today are eating more salt than they used to.

When you don’t know past trends, predicting the future is a wide-open game.

More here.

Spencer Michels at the website of the PBS Newshour:

A 33-year-old math and science whiz kid — working out of his house in California's Silicon Valley — may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he's become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free…

Khan's story — featured Monday on the NewsHour — is inspiring. A math and science graduate of MIT with an MBA from Harvard, he was one of those math-savvy kids who did great in school, and then decided to make some money. As an Indian-American (born in New Orleans), education — especially math and science — were important in his household. But when one of his cousins, a seventh grader, told him at a family gathering that she was having trouble with math — especially converting grams to kilograms — he decided to help her, long distance. He devised a method where he talked to her via the computer, with a blackboard on the screen, and after a few weeks she started to get it. Her progress was speedy, and he decided that the method he'd improvised, would work for others.

So he began putting short math lessons on the Internet, never showing his face, but keeping it simple and direct. He has a great gift for communicating, for explaining math concepts that I used to have problems with, and so did a lot of others.

More here. And here's a short overview video about the Khan Academy [recipient of the 2009 Microsoft Tech Award in Education]:

Melly Alazraki in Daily Finance:

Britain's House of Commons on Monday dealt a blow to CAM. “Homeopathic products perform no better than placebos,” said the Parliamentary committee's report, which concludes: “To maintain patient trust, choice and safety, the Government should not endorse the use of placebo treatments, including homeopathy.”

In the face of the looming health-care reform, U.S. Senators have been trying to add various provisions to the bill: Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has tried to push insurance coverage for alternative medicines; and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has attached a provision that would cover Christian Science prayer treatments.

It's unclear whether faith-based medicine has ever been clinically tested, but a spotcheck of the NCCAM Health page and its Office of Dietary Supplement fact sheet shows that many remedies have very limited health benefit, if any. WIth an industry whose products offer a greater risk of danger than a promise of benefit, and as the public keeps buying into these remedies, the U.S. should intervene not to support the trend of their growing use, as Harkin and Hatch would seem to support, but reducing our reliance on quackery.

More here.

At the Jaipur Literature Festival. This performance took place at Music Stage at the festival on January 24, 2010:

Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

I certainly did not mean to suggest with my recent etymological reflections on 'seminal' that I am at all interested in restarting the political-correctness wars of the early 1990s. That is an old and boring topic, and by now it is only the most dithering and out-of-the-loop callers on AM talk-radio, along with the very most impotent and alienated of bloggers, who continue to find menacing the basic proposals for language reform that came out of these wars. I am a strong advocate of a prescriptive approach to language that actively molds it to better fit the ideas we wish to express, and if we are committed to the idea of gender equality then we should certainly try to speak in a way that does not, e.g., presuppose that all doctors are male. But what I do not like is when we, on the side of gender equality, help the talk-radio callers to make their inarticulate point for them by being stupid ourselves, and I take the mistaken belief that 'seminal' refers only to male semen to be one such instance of stupidity.

There are numerous other ones, and most of them seem to arise from the belief that we can identify, isolate, and eliminate a definite set of lexical items, rather than recognizing that different words and expressions might be appropriate at different registers. Yes, we should signal our commitment to gender equality in the way we use direct, declarative speech, but we should not presume that the new rules of direct declarative speech excuse us from mastering all the different ways of speaking and writing of fellow language users who do not or did not share our sensibilities.

More here.

Some people have it rough. Born into the East Coast cultural aristocracy in 1913, Mercedes Matter began life as a beloved and privileged artistic prodigy. Her father was Arthur B. Carles, a pioneer American abstract painter who studied with Matisse, showed at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery and exhibited work in the legendary Armory Show. He was also an unrepentant bohemian: long-haired and bearded, a lifelong alcoholic and womanizer. Her mother, Mercedes de Cordoba, was a Parisian correspondent for Vogue and a favorite model of photographer Edward Steichen. Her uncle Pedro was a star of Broadway and early Hollywood, and her aunt Sara was a famous fashion photographer and illustrator. Her father started her painting at the age of 6, and she spent her early teens touring the art capitals of Europe. After attending the progressive girls’ school Bennett College in Millbrook, New York, she moved to Manhattan and began studying with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students’ League.

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health is housed in a former Jesuit seminary built in the 1950s, on a rise with broad views of the Berkshires. The long hallways have the institutional feel of a high school, except that everyone is speaking in respectful tones, and rolled yoga mats are everywhere, like baguettes in Doisneau’s Paris. On the walls are limited-edition photographs of lean people doing yoga in front of moss-dappled Indian shrines. At the gift shop on an early February weekend, visitors could have their tarot read, or a photographic portrait taken of their aura. And one of the featured speakers, offering a weekend-long seminar, was a senior professor at Harvard University, Ellen Langer. Langer is a famous psychologist poised to get much more famous, but not in the ways most researchers do. She is best known for two things: her concept of mindlessness – the idea that much of what we believe to be rational thought is in fact just our brains on autopilot – and her concept of mindfulness, the idea that simply paying attention to our everyday lives can make us happier and healthier. She was Harvard’s first tenured woman professor of psychology, and her discoveries helped trigger, among other things, the burgeoning positive-psychology movement. Her 1989 book, “Mindfulness,” was an international bestseller, and she remains in high demand as a speaker everywhere from New York’s 92d Street Y to the leadership guru Tony Robbins’s Fiji resort. And now a movie about her life is in development with Jennifer Aniston signed on to star as Langer.

more from Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe here.

From Wikipedia:

Malcolm X has been described as one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history. He is credited with raising the self-esteem of black Americans and reconnecting them with their African heritage. He is largely responsible for the spread of Islam in the black community in the United States.

Many African Americans, especially those who lived in cities in the Northern and Western United States, felt that Malcolm X articulated their complaints concerning inequality better than the mainstream civil rights movement did. One biographer says that by giving expression to their frustration, Malcolm X “made clear the price that white America would have to pay if it did not accede to black America's legitimate demands.”

In the late 1960s, as black activists became more radical, Malcolm X and his teachings were part of the foundation on which they built their movements. The Black Power movement, the Black Arts Movement,and the widespread adoption of the slogan “Black is beautiful“ can all trace their roots to Malcolm X.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Since the birth of the first “test tube baby” in 1978, more than three million children have been born with the help of reproductive technology. Most of them are healthy. But as a group they're at a higher risk for low birth weight, which is associated with obesity, hypertension and type 2 diabetes later in life.

Carmen Sapienza, a geneticist at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, is studying two groups of children—one comprising those conceived naturally, the other made up of children conceived via assisted reproductive technology—to identify epigenetic (changes in gene expression caused by molecular mechanisms other than mutations in the DNA sequence itself) differences among them. He is particularly interested in a chromosomal modification called “DNA methylation,” research he presented February 22 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “We found that 5 to 10 percent of these chromosome modifications were different in children born through assisted reproduction, and this altered the expression of nearby genes,” Sapienza says. Several of the genes whose expression differed between the two groups have been implicated in chronic metabolic disorders, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.

More here.

Michael O'Donnell in The Nation:

In a recent dissent that was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Scalia argued, astonishingly, that the Constitution does not forbid executing a demonstrably innocent man, so long as he has been given a fair trial first. (Justice John Paul Stevens, the senior liberal on the Court, responded in a concurring opinion that putting to death an innocent person would “be an atrocious violation of our Constitution.”) In his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, from 2003, in which the Supreme Court struck down Texas's anti-sodomy law, Scalia compared laws outlawing gay sex with those prohibiting bigamy, incest and bestiality. Having cleared his throat, Scalia then declared,

Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as “discrimination” which it is the function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession's anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously “mainstream” [and] that in most States what the Court calls “discrimination” against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal.

Scalia's expression of base sentiments in fluid, vigorous prose is a strange blending of the high and the low–like a Catholic Mass in which the liturgy is led by a bearded hippie strumming a guitar and singing in Latin. Scalia attempted to qualify these ugly lines in the next paragraph of his dissent by insisting, “I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts–or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them–than I would forbid it to do so.” Scalia seems genuinely baffled at the widespread incredulity that increasingly greets such protestations. His trademark busy italics might convey a spirit of apolitical rectitude, but they can't conceal the striking overlap of his judicial opinions with socially conservative policy preferences.

If there is nothing more admirable than a judge forgoing personal beliefs to uphold legal principles, there is nothing more distasteful than a judge who claims to do so against strong evidence to the contrary. Scalia's purportedly neutral, apolitical jurisprudence has moved him to vote against affirmative action, protection for abortion, rights for gays and lesbians, and equal treatment of women, and in favor of practically unfettered capital punishment, gun ownership and the open embrace of Christianity by the state.

Alexandar Hemon discusses 5 books on the topic, in The Browser:

Tell me about The Known World.

It’s a novel about slavery, but specifically the few recorded instances of black slave-owners, and it’s a masterful, masterful work, the most complete work of literary imagination in recent American fiction. Edward P Jones could be one of the greatest living American writers. Again it blocks the simple emotional reading that provides redemption, and teaches you that slavery was bad. It shows how dehumanising the whole system was, not only to the slaves, but to everyone involved; it is quite literally soul-emptying. It is of course, again, in some ways like the Holocaust: it was not madness, it was a rational system, an economic system in which all participated in various ways. Even among the slaves there were differences and hierarchies, and degrees of ethical involvement with the issue of slavery. Jones narrates, or manages, dozens of characters. They’re all individually defined, but there’s no central consciousness the way there might be in a straight up psychological novel that you follow as it progresses through some sort of sociological landscape, and so it’s like he’s conducting an orchestra of characters. He shifts from one to the other and has this particular narrative device in which he goes beyond the knowledge of his characters to tell the reader what will happen to them in the years after slavery. The suffering is not simply the physical suffering of individuals; it goes well beyond that. It goes to the heart of the system.

What Jones does is very important, I believe, when we’re talking about war and violence and suffering: not to reduce the understanding to a mere emotional response. Of course the Holocaust is horrifying, of course slavery is horrifying, but if you just see emotional release and redemption then you never understand it and never experience it as a reader.

Jason Epstein in the NYRB:

Amid the literary chaos of the digital future, readers will be guided by the imprints of reputable publishers, distinguishable within a worldwide, multilingual directory, a function that Google seems poised to dominate—one hopes with the cooperation of great national and university libraries and their skilled bibliographers, under revised world copyright standards in keeping with the reach of the World Wide Web. Titles will also be posted on authors' and publishers' own Web sites and on reliable Web sites of special interest where biographies of Napoleon or manuals of dog training will be evaluated by competent critics and downloaded directly from author or publisher to end user while software distributes the purchase price appropriately, bypassing traditional formulas. With inventory expense, shipping, and returns eliminated, readers will pay less, authors will earn more, and book publishers, rid of their otiose infrastructure, will survive and may prosper.

This future is a predictable inference from digitization in its current stage of development in the United States, its details widely discussed in the blogosphere by partisans of various outcomes, including the utopian fantasy that in the digital future content will be free of charge and authors will not have to eat.

Digitization will encourage an unprecedented diversity of new specialized content in many languages. The more adaptable of today's general publishers will survive the redundancy of their traditional infrastructure but digitization has already begun to spawn specialized publishers occupying a variety of niches staffed by small groups of like-minded editors, perhaps not in the same office or even the same country, much as software firms themselves are decentralized with staff in California collaborating online with colleagues in Bangalore and Barcelona.

The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer's work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years.

Russell Shorto in the New York Times Magazine:

There was a religious element to the American Revolution, which was so pronounced that you could just as well view the event in religious as in political terms. Many of the founders, especially the Southerners, were rebelling simultaneously against state-church oppression and English rule. The Connecticut Baptists saw Jefferson — an anti-Federalist who was bitterly opposed to the idea of establishment churches — as a friend. “Our constitution of government,” they wrote, “is not specific” with regard to a guarantee of religious freedoms that would protect them. Might the president offer some thoughts that, “like the radiant beams of the sun,” would shed light on the intent of the framers? In his reply, Jefferson said it was not the place of the president to involve himself in religion, and he expressed his belief that the First Amendment’s clauses — that the government must not establish a state religion (the so-called establishment clause) but also that it must ensure the free exercise of religion (what became known as the free-exercise clause) — meant, as far as he was concerned, that there was “a wall of separation between Church & State.”

This little episode, culminating in the famous “wall of separation” metaphor, highlights a number of points about teaching religion in American history. For one, it suggests — as the Christian activists maintain — how thoroughly the colonies were shot through with religion and how basic religion was to the cause of the revolutionaries.

More here.

Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, and AL Kennedy in The Guardian:

Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac�ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look�ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be �annoying, especially a prologue �following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”

3 Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

More here.