In the latest issue of GQ, Boris Kachka tries to review Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue in one sentence. The justification for this is somewhat weak — he cites Jonathan Franzen for having a ‘long’ sentence in Freedom (wait: 307 words doesn’t really count as “long”) and the fact that Chabon himself tries a 12 page […]
I’ve been reading “The Stories of J.F. Powers” on the recommendation of Charles Baxter, who mentioned Powers in his excellent collection of essays on writing, “The Art of Subtext.” Baxter situates Powers as an alternative to Flannery O’Connor, saying that he hates O’Connor because her imagination is “nourished by cruelty,” she uses her characters for […]
A woman just used Google autocomplete to characterize every state in the nation. The results are funny. The first one for Illinois is “Why is Illinois so … corrupt?” According to autocomplete, Oregon is weird, rainy and liberal. Georgia is hot, racist and boring. So I decided to do the same for literature: Why is […]
An excerpt from a work in progress: “Any interaction with a book is a type of intercourse: a ménage a trois between reader, writer, and work. The way literary theorists interact with a text is sadistic. They take pleasure in the pain of the text and, judging by the contortions of the prose, the pain […]
Charles Baxter takes down John Irving in the New York Review of Books: But the pitfalls of a novel constructed largely through plot are also on display: the characters and their construction here are schematic, as if written to and for a thesis that requires them to be dropped into slots. We are repeatedly clobbered by […]
A meditation on grief, writing colonies, and summer blockbusters: Yaddo itself was born from grief, that great leveler. The colony became a playground for creative minds because Katrina Trask, the matriarch of the mansion and its well-maintained grounds, lost all of her children in infancy or childhood and she needed something to do with her […]
Where are you when you speak to your audience? Harold Brodkey says each author has a particular location from where he speaks to his audience — fireplace, bar, outdoors, drawing room. “A kind of writing solely meant for a public forum is often less interesting than writing where the writer has invented the public space […]
A wonderful description from Sartre of what literature should be, on par with Kafka’s famous pronouncement about the ax breaking the ice: “We did not want to delight our public with its superiority to a dead world—we wanted to take it by the throat. Let every character be a trap, let the reader be caught […]
In the latest issue of Poets and Writers, Paige Wheeler, founder of the literary agency Folio, explains her company’s approach to maximizing revenue for writers: “Folio’s motto, emblazoned across its website, is “thinking beyond the page,” and, as Wheeler explains, Folio is positioning itself for the next wave of publishing by looking at its clients […]
Saw this Redbox for books at the American Library Association (ALA) conference this weekend. An automated vending machine to check out books? Sounds like the future of libraries to me.
