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 […]
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 […]
