French artist Stephane Heuet has visualized a book long thought to be beyond visualization. Over fifteen years he offered six installments of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” in French, and now this graphic novel has been collected and will be released in English. Faithful Proustians will surely make an uproar about how much has been lost, […]
I love this right-scrolling video game with punctuation. So reminiscent of the early 90s Nintendo games.
Anne Enright in conversation with Diane Prokop at The Millions: “Well, I wrote out beyond the end of this book, and then I brought it back in again. I wanted the characters to be on the brink of something new, without actually going into that territory. You get out early in your ending. I sometimes […]
If you haven’t yet read J.M. Ledgard’s novel “Submergence,” you should. Ledgard is wonderfully worldly, veering between microscopic jellies of the ocean to intricate knowledge of Somalian culture and the psychology of al-Qaeda jihadists. It’s hard to come up with a comparable author who demonstrates such widespread and intricate knowledge of the world. Although it’s a disservice to […]
The Tournament of Books released its longlist — 62 books (!). They will narrow it down to 16 in January. In case you can’t wait until January, here are the 16 I would love to see compete come March. You can view this either as a prediction or as a recommendation — take your pick. […]
Christopher Beha in Harper’s: “The publishing industry in this city tends to view the introduction of religion into contemporary realist novels as a willful act that must have some strong rhetorical justification. From where I stand, the exclusion of religion is the willful act. Novelists never get asked why they don’t include religion in their books, or why […]
So I made it a public goal to read twenty books during the month of March, and I did it! I facetiously riffed off National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) by calling it NaNoReMo. Here’s a list for those curious about what I read. It’s mostly stuff I picked up this year at AWP. It’s rather […]
Karl Ove Knausgaard in The Guardian: “The critical reading of the texts always resulted in parts being deleted. So that was what I did. My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn’t write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if […]
Ann Beattie on interruptions in fiction: “Often I use a non sequitur or a stranger saying something out of the blue as a way to change the emotional register. My students make fun of me for saying, I’ve read this carefully now, and you’ve written it carefully — too carefully. The phone never rings, people […]
