In Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, he talks a lot about his writing process, and how he learned to write while under the fatwa. Below are snippets of advice gleaned from the book, and remember that this was written in the third person, so when there is a “he” or “Joseph Anton,” that refers to […]
Marilynne Robinson on how she teaches her students: “I try to make writers actually see what they have written, where the strength is. Usually in fiction there’s something that leaps out—an image or a moment that is strong enough to center the story. If they can see it, they can exploit it, enhance it, and […]
Colm Toibin on writers: “You have to be a terrible monster to write. Someone might have told you something they shouldn’t have told you, and you have to be prepared to use it because it will make a great story. You have to use it even though the person is identifiable. If you can’t do […]
David Foster Wallace wrote a postcard to a fan, and the fan writes about moving from initial disappointment to a gradual realization of what Wallace was trying to say. Yes, even DFW postcards can be deep: “[David Foster Wallace] was telling me what I already knew but had forgotten over the long years of struggling for […]
Jonathan Franzen was wrong about many things. About Oprah’s book club. About the value of Twitter. About the quality of Freedom. But he was not wrong about Paula Fox. Franzen championed Fox (no relation to your proprietor) early in his career, before he published The Corrections, talking her up in essays in Harper’s and writing […]
Last week the National Book Award nominees came out, and D.G. Myers hated them. Really hated them. He said “don’t bother” with Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, that Dave Eggers is a middlebrow novelist, that Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is derivative. I won’t argue with his dismissal of the selections. But I will argue with why he […]
Alex Epstein published seven micro-fictions over at Recommended Reading last week, and I love this one about a writer: Due to a tiny crack in the time-space continuum, E. received a remarkably polite rejection letter from a publisher for a novel he had not written. He threw the letter in the trash and forgot about […]
A celebration of embellished prose at the New York Times: The novelists I find myself attracted to are those who cannot resist the extra adjective, the additional image, the scale-tipping clause. It feels necessary to assert and celebrate this, for we are living in puritanical times. The contemporary preference seems to be for the economical, […]
The Nobel Prize for Literature has an august tradition of selecting authors for their political beliefs. Herta Muller roundly condemned Nazism and Fascism in her works. Orhan Pamuk thrashed Turkey so soundly over the genocide of Armenians that he was brought up for trial and ended up in exile. J.M. Coetzee excoriated South Africa for […]
