Jason Porter has a story in Electric Literature called “We Were Down.” I love his narrator’s description of a kiss: She says, “Would you like to kiss me?” I say, “That is not fair.” She pulls on my pockets, forcing me to lean into her. I am close enough to smell that she has never […]
Did I read less this year? Well, yes, unfortunately. But did I write an entire novel this year? Absolutely yes! According to my end-of-the-year accounting, I’m going to believe that my novel success counterbalances my reading shortcoming. Some favorite books of the year: I continued my Orhan Pamuk streak with Istanbul, The Black Book and […]
From Don DeLillo’s Paris Review interview: INTERVIEWER How do you begin? What are the raw materials of a story? DeLILLO I think the scene comes first, an idea of a character in a place. It’s visual, it’s Technicolor—something I see in a vague way. Then sentence by sentence into the breach. No outlines— maybe a […]
The latest issue of the Santa Monica Review (Fall 2013) showcases a number of short shorts. This isn’t the standard modus operandi—last issue, Spring 2013, contained only a few longer stories and a novella. This is something I appreciate about SMR—they feature a wide variety of tastes, styles and lengths, never narrowing the field of […]
After the wildly stupid and controversial pick of Mo Yan last year for the Nobel Prize for Literature, this year the academy wised up and picked the safest choice possible: Alice Munro. Everyone loves Alice Munro. She’s delightful and she writes world-class literature. What’s more, she is only the 13th woman in history to win […]
Paris Review interview with Louise Erdrich: At last, I had this epiphany. I wanted to write prose, and I understood that my real problem with writing was not that I couldn’t do it mentally. I couldn’t do it physically. I could not sit still. Literally, could not sit still. So I had to solve no […]
Italo Calvino: “However—and this is the point—it is worth it. Or rather: one does not ask if it’s worth it. We are people, there is no doubt, who exist solely insofar as we write, otherwise we don’t exist at all. Even if we did not have a single reader any more, we would have to […]
Good advice from Charles Baxter: The truth is that, in worldly terms, someone is always doing better than you are. Someone is always winning more of the prizes or making more of the money or getting more famous. When you open the newspaper, someone else’s picture is likely to be splashed across the book page. […]
From the Electric Literature blog, Letters from a Young Novelist #3: In recovery language, we have a phrase called “pulling a geographic,” which is an illogical belief that switching locations will solve all of one’s life problems, when in fact the problems are rooted in the person and their substance abuse. I have pulled a […]
From the Barry Hannah interview in Paris Review: “Third-person singular, past tense, is most natural and inevitable, I guess. But you’d best beware the monotone in it and the temptations toward false wisdom, cleverness. First person is where you can be more interesting as a fool, and I find this often leads to the more delightful […]
