Posts by author
Guia Cortassa
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Angelheaded Hipsters Burning
And we are, aren’t we, us fiftysomethings? We’re the pierced and tattooed, shorts-wearing, skunk-smoking, OxyContin-popping, neurotic dickheads who’ve presided over the commoditisation of the counterculture; we’re the ones who took the avant-garde and turned it into a successful rearguard action…
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Books Are Here to Stay
Many people who buy exclusively e-books still like to browse in physical bookstores and look at physical books. The printed book is far from dead. At BuzzFeed Books, Lincoln Michel has an essay on the future of the ongoing battle between…
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Simply and Swiftly
In 1906, aged 21, D.H. Lawrence wrote to his future fiancée Louise Burrows with writing advice after reading an essay on art she’d sent to him. Among many other remarkable lines, the British author told Burrows that “[l]ike most girl…
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Singer-Novel Writer
“It’s sort of like comparing making a fire and building a house,” he says. “A song is fire. You react to it primarily, instantly. You don’t have to decide whether you like it, and you don’t really have to sit…
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Life-Changing Books
In the latest installment of “Bookends” at the New York Times, Leslie Jamison and Francine Prose discuss whether a book could ever change a reader’s life in a negative way. While Jamison thinks that “[n]ovels might not make us worse, but…
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A Footnotes Advocacy
Many readers, and perhaps some publishers, seem to view endnotes, indexes, and the like as gratuitous dressing—the literary equivalent of purple kale leaves at the edges of the crudités platter. You put them there to round out and dignify the…
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The Art of Homage
But what if your entire book is based on another one? What if a certain piece of information (in the cases of these books, a writer or a specific novel) is foundational to your text? How, then, should you proceed?…
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Almost Like Leonard Cohen’s Blues
Besides being the amazing singer/songwriter we all know, Leonard Cohen is also an acclaimed poet and novelist. “Almost Like the Blues,” a new poem of his, is now out on The New Yorker.
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The Novel of Economics
Following her essay about the influence of Adam Smith’s economic theories in Jane Austen’s novels, writing at The Atlantic, Shannon Chamberlain gets back to the topic, this time debating what influence fiction had, and in particular the emerging genre of the novel,…
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An Ideal MFA
How would a writer without an MFA imagine an ideal Creative Writing degree program? Over at Ploughshares, Rebecca Makkai invites you to consider her optimal 2015/2016 course catalog, warning that “the course offerings will be much more practical than “Problems…
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The Game of Writing
“WRITER: THE GAME is a not-for-profit writing lifestyle simulator created by Matthew Burnside, the goal of which is to be a productive writer without succumbing to soul-crushing rejection or the wicked diversions of the internet” Yes, that’s exactly it: an online…