Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Writing in the Age of Google
If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and…
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Tangled Detectives
While the novels’ detective protagonists pick their way with varying success through a maze of vexing people and circumstances, readers navigates their own tangled maze of contradictory conventions as the narratives hop from genre to genre, toying with readers’ expectations.…
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A Character By Any Other Name
Over at the New Yorker, Sam Sacks considers why “in recent years, a curious number of novelists have declined to avail themselves of that basic prerogative: naming their creations,” letting a deluge of nameless characters emerge.
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Hunting the Pages
I find the threat of predation satisfying in a short story because, when done well, it solicits a visceral reaction. The etymology of the word visceral can be traced to the Latin word viscera, which was used to refer to…
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Live Long and Prosper Writing
Sticking a grade-schooler in front of Star Trek might lead to a brief obsession with spandex, but with me it also meant absorbing tons of non-grade school words. From “purview” to “enmity” to “geneticist” to plain-old “stoic,” the scholarly verbal…
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Writing in the Age of Social Networks
[W]anting to make a career in letters and not being on Twitter and Facebook — that is, not wanting to share your work constantly with the strangers you met on airplanes and in restaurants and people you hadn’t seen since…
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Chekhov in His Own Words
All that is nonsense though. Write what you like. If you haven’t facts make up with lyricism. In 1892, Anton Chekhov sent a letter to V. A. Tihonov including a fictitious 200-word bio. 123 years later to the day, the…
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The End Has a Start
I wasn’t sure that it was elegant, or even grammatically sound, but I did know it was just how my narrator—who spends the novel negotiating issues of privacy and voyeurism—would want the book to end. Grammatical or not, it was…
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On Sisters, Love, and Rage
Sometimes I envy Absalom. He had recourse. He had power. He raised up an army in his rage. He did something. He turned his rage into an insurrection. All I’ve ever done is turn my anger into words. How can…
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Writing the Story of Your Life
Keeping a diary requires strong commitment and great honesty, and Zadie Smith has struggled with the idea of journaling all through her life, as she writes in her latest essay, “Life Writing,” over at Rookie.
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For the Love of Chapters
What I’m talking about instead are the ways in which chapters are not merely components of a narrative’s foundational architecture but also part of its aesthetic, i.e., more like those imposing Ionic columns that both hold up the facade and…
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Reviewing July
So my introduction to July was one at which I watched her redefine boundaries and hijack something destined to be inert and turn it into something uncomfortably alive, whether you wanted her to or not. This has been my experience…