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Like Fire
Wednesday night’s Story Prize event was, as always, entertaining and edifying. There’s something about the chemistry of getting three very disparate short story writers together to read their work and talk about it—the distillery that goes into short fiction makes for some good, concentrated conversation among its practitioners, and three is a reasonable number for [...]
Read MoreThe Tournament of Books is off and running with a rousing opener, complete with intrigue, insults, and innuendo—who could ask for more? Each year the ToB opens with a pre-Tournament playoff round, a kind of throat-clearing to get readers in the groove, let them dust off their commenting IDs, and prepare everyone to sling a [...]
Read MoreSnow, huh Good God, y’all What is it good for? Absolutely nothing Say it again With all due apologies to Edwin Starr, I think this is how a good two-thirds of the country feels right now. No, really, I do understand the actual geo-meteorological necessity for snow, and why we need cold temperatures and snowpack [...]
Read MoreI don’t care much for self-help books, but I love literature that masquerades as self-help—Sheila Heti’s genius title, How Should a Person Be?, or Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful How to Live (or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer). I don’t think novels, or even philosophical essays, are going to [...]
Read More1963: To borrow a line from Frank Sinatra, it was a very good year. Many fine works saw the light of day in 1963, some celebrated and some unsung—but to get to the point, a lot of good books were published. (I bet you thought you knew where I was going with that, didn’t you?) [...]
Read MoreThe writer is a passionate animal; two writers in the same space, physical or virtual, will lock horns pleasingly often. I say “pleasingly” because—let’s face it—watching articulate types go at it is always fun. Sometimes these feuds raise real questions; more often they’re vaguely embarrassing to all parties involved. Once in a while reputations are [...]
Read MoreP.S. The parts underlined in green are links… there’s one thing that doesn’t translate too well from paper to pixel. (Paper: Field Notes FN-01 graph paper notebook. Pen: Lamy Safari.)
Read MoreI remember very little of what I read in my high school English classes. Some titles have stuck: Jude the Obscure, 1984, Émile Zola’s Germinal, the requisite profusion of Shakespeare. But given four years in a class that was supposedly my favorite, those are some terrible statistics. Granted, a lot of that is probably due [...]
Read MoreIf I had a little more time on my hands, or at least a little more patience, this would be the time to make up some cards for Book Award Bingo. Short lists are out this week from the National Book Critics Circle, The Tournament of Books, and my perennial favorite award ceremony, The Story [...]
Read MoreFrances and Bernard Carlene Bauer Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013 Carlene Bauer’s debut novel, Frances and Bernard, reminded me why I enjoy reading letters so much, either in collections of correspondence or as epistolary fiction. Letters are a step up from journal writing in their self-conscious display of innermost philosophical workings, and when done right they’re [...]
Read MoreMy Education Susan Choi Viking Adult, 2013 Schadenfreude is a wonderful thing: we can watch empires fall and wonder why they didn’t have better homeowners’ insurance or more canned goods, whatever satisfies that secret need for smugness that we all need to indulge once in a while. A novel entitled My Education promises something along [...]
Read More… for all good bloggers reflect on the past 12 months of whatever it is they write about, and although I’m generally resistant to anything that everybody else is doing, I’m so pleased to have a little time on my hands right now that I find myself wanting to put in my two cents as [...]
Read MoreThe long list for the 2014 Tournament of Books is up; let the opining begin. Out of the 90-odd novels listed I’ve read eight, own another four, and have six or so more either on library hold or vaguely wishlisted. That means I stand a half decent shot of being able to hold forth in [...]
Read MoreThis time of year brings out not only the list-makers, but the list-lovers and list-haters as well. The literary ether seems to be especially ripe for that kind of debate, maybe because these end-of-year best-ofs can seem wan in comparison to the the jockeying of all the literary awards scattered throughout the calendar. Or maybe [...]
Read MoreI don’t pretend to know much about poetry criticism… at least not to the degree that I pretend to know all sorts of things about prose criticism. But I do like reading it, even if a lot of what’s being proposed probably sails right over my head. Which is why I like reading Stephen Burt—aside [...]
Read MoreNichole Bernier crossed my radar recently as the writer of a great “Experience Required” essay over at Bloom that asked the question: Does publishing a novel change your life?. She also, it turns out, blogs at the very good writers’ collective Beyond the Margins—definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already, as there are a [...]
Read MoreI’ve been thinking about the upcoming Hogarth Shakespeare project. The idea was announced a few months ago, but this week, for some reason, I’ve been progressing through a veritable Kübler-Ross model of literary ambivalence. The series looked like fun at first light. In anticipation of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death in 2016, Vintage [...]
Read MoreApologies to whatever readers I may have left; I’m very much in the weeds these days and the expectations of academia are doing their best to separate me from the fun and spontaneity that are necessary for blogging. But I shall do my best to fight the good fight. For starters, there’s been interesting news [...]
Read MoreEverybody needs advice sometimes. Whether everybody wants it is another matter, but there’s a reason so many people love Cary Tennis, Dan Savage, and Dear Prudence (although I do NOT like the videos, Prudence—such a lack of intimacy). In my day, kids, we had the choice of Ann Landers and Dear Abby, and god forbid [...]
Read MoreCharles Simic has one of his gently bookish rants up at the NYRBlog, on a subject that’s always near and dear to my heart: the uncertain future of browsing. The gradual shuttering of used bookstores all over the country, says Simic, will surely curtail those moments of finding books that were never on our radar [...]
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