Posts by author
Jake Slovis
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A Good Film Is Hard To Find
For Electric Literature’s podcast Ryder + Flye, Jason Diamond chats with author Margaret Elby about why so few of Flannery O’Connor’s works have been adapted for the big screen, and more.
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The “Sealed” Literary World
For The Millions, Kate McCahill reflects on illiteracy in the modern world and checks her privilege for growing up “book-rich”: Books, I realized sharply, suddenly, are too expensive. They’re a luxury item, designated for the rich, for the privileged. Guiltily, I…
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Capturing the Movement of Consciousness
For Electric Literature, Laura Preston interviews Garth Greenwell about his recent debut novel What Belongs to You. The two discuss what led Greenwell to transition from writing poetry to fiction, his experiences teaching in Bulgaria, and English syntax: I’m endlessly fascinated with…
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Art Is Not A Formula
Electric Literature’s Lincoln Michel writes a rebuttal to a recent Atlantic article “All Stories Are The Same,” which attempts to reduce stories to basic formulas. Michel argues: These self-congratulatory attempts to reduce art to formula rarely tell us anything useful about stories. These formulas…
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Where Are All The “Good” Guys?
For Electric Literature, Liesl Schillinger reflects on his struggles to find examples of “good” men in contemporary fiction, and shares his joy in finding one in Lauren Groff‘s Fates and Furies. Further, he argues that despite the self-deprecating narrator in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle,…
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A Faithful and Fortifying Humanism
James Woods profiles poet Yehuda Amichai for the New Yorker. Woods suggests that although Amichai is “bound up with contemporary Israeli life,” his “faithful and fortifying humanism” makes his work relevant on a global scale.
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Insincerity and False Candor
For the New Yorker, David Denby listens to Jane Austen’s Emma and reflects on how listening to the book highlights the insincerity of the its characters: Austen was one of the first modern writers, one of the first thoroughly to understand the unconscious…
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Learning to Write, One Sentence at a Time
At the Guardian, Angela Chen profiles poet Robin Coste Lewis, who was only permitted to write one sentence a day after sustaining severe brain damage: “I would sit there for eight hours a day thinking of one line and it became…
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History Is Addictive
For Public Books, David Kurnick explores how Elena Ferrante’s attention to history contributes to the addictive nature of her novels and is helping to “revive” realism: The addictive quality of the Neapolitan novels on which everyone agrees may finally derive from their…
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Nowhere to Hide
At the Guardian, Lisa McInerney explains how writing short fiction helped her to develop the skills to write a novel: Short fiction leaves its author nowhere to hide. I cannot disappear into a character or some grand conspiracy, as I can…
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Letter From Woolf Costs A Pretty Penny
For the Guardian, Alison Flood reports that a letter from Virginia Woolf to her friend Philip Morrel will go to auction with a guide price of £1,000-£1,500. The letter tells of Woolf’s experience during the Battle of Britain and urges her friend…
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America’s “Narrow” Reading Habits
At Electric Literature, Joshua Lockwood interviews PANK‘s founding editor M. Bartley Seigel about the origins of PANK, which was sold in November and will be under new management by the end of the year. In addition, Seigel discusses what his experience as an editor taught him about…