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 […]
The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced on Thursday, October 11th. The best roundup of likely candidates is at the Literary Saloon, as per usual. M.A. Orthofer runs down a list of contenders, offering pros, cons, and long shots. My predictions would go in the direction of the African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o or […]
Not too serious writing advice from McSweeney’s: (this is #1 out of 10) Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your buy cheap meds pages as daily workouts. Think […]
How to Talk to Your Creative Writing Professor about your Work (thanks, Tod Goldberg)
Salman Rushdie on his new book “Joseph Anton,” which is a memoir in the third person about his time living underneath the fatwa:
Imagine if I was in a race with a famous cyclist. Let’s say this cyclist is named Lance Armstrong. If the recent drug charges bother you, let’s call him Jan Ullrich or Eddy Merckx or Séan Kelly. The identity of the cyclist doesn’t matter, just that he’s renown for cycling. I am not a cyclist. I bike. Occasionally. […]
