Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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L-IT-erature
Cohen is the perfect age to write such a book, having lived approximately an even number of years on either side of the pre-Web/post-Web divide. He gets “kids these days” and partakes of their Net-fueled narcissism, owning it in a…
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Notes on Craft
“Craft” is a fluid term; used in aeronautics and astronautics to speak of a single vessel, or the skill of deception, or a verb analogous to “make.” Craft in literature is comprised of narrative elements and literary devices: the nuts…
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The Emigrants
Can we trust Sebald’s words? It doesn’t matter. The fragmented motifs, repeated images, are scattered throughout the texts and sweep you along to a conclusion, at which there magically appears sense to the whole. Verily, the field has been thoroughly…
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Daring to Prose
But as Hallberg pointed out, context, not tradition, is what should decide or generate the style of any work of fiction. Chigozie Obioma considers the possibility and audacity of prose from a non-Western point of view in an essay over…
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Welcome to the Rest of Your Life
Building a life based on lies was how my parents had taught me to live, and it would take a full twenty-one years after I left home the first time, at seventeen, to begin to try to do it differently.…
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Consider the Footnote
Examining yet another fundamental element of text, Jonathan Russell Clark writes an essay “on the fine art of the footnote” over at Lit Hub.
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A Life in Non-Fiction
I’ve always been a late bloomer in some ways, and extremely precocious in other ways. When I was twenty I was living in New York and working a job and could barely bother to be a college student and had…
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Living in the Republic
The church on Siegfeldstrasse was open to anyone who embarrassed the Republic, and Andreas Wolf was so much of an embarrassment that he actually resided there, in the basement of the rectory, but unlike the others—the true Christian believers, the…
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The Great Gay Novel
But no coverage of the book I’ve seen has discussed it as a novel fundamentally about gay lives—as the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years. Garth Greenwell claims…
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Short Story Long
Over at the Guardian, Chris Powers tackles David Foster Wallace’s short stories, and their place within his body of work.
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Keeping the Mud Alive
While I’d never admit it, I’ve always harbored a shame about wanting to write. Even fictional characters who aspired to the same goal made me squirm with unease. Every Thursday night, as we watched the television series The Waltons, I…
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Travelling Without Moving
In the finished novel, this journey will take up four sentences. My virtual mapping of the route will have almost no discernible impact on the prose that I’ve already sketched out – as adjectives go, “nondescript” doesn’t paint much of…