Posts by author
Kyle Williams
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The New Yorker Novella
[T]he long short story/novella is a fantastic medium for story, one that is uniquely suited to the online platform. The New Yorker has begun a new online series, New Yorker Novella, to be comprised of novellas the magazine wasn’t “able to…
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Literary Losers
Umberto Eco, at a public appearance in the UK to support Numero Zero, imparted some choice thoughts on what makes literature, and on what makes his distinct, from conspiracies and public knowledge to literary losers: It’s very boring to talk about…
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Androidish Spy Paraphernalia
The New York Times brought together two distinctly imaginative authors, George Saunders and Jennifer Egan, for a chat on writing the future, their famously fabulist impulses, and the core of why we turn to literature at all.
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Poems That Kill
And after that, it can go into a book. Which is a great place for poetry to die, you know? Jay Deshpande sat down with Montana Ray to discuss her book, (guns & butter), a collection of poems shaped like…
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Fundamentally Unfamiliar
At The Nation, Ava Kofman talks about Clarice Lispector and her continual mystique as a writer who refuted such nonsense as plot, rebuked literature from Borges to Joyce, and still captured the literary world with a fierce grip and claws:…
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Vonnegut in the House of Magic
Asked years later why he had chosen to write science fiction in his early days, Kurt replied “There was no avoiding it, since the General Electric Company WAS science fiction.” Over at Work in Progress, Ginger Strand shows us how…
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Justifying the Template
Too many stories about mopey suburbanites. Too many well-off white people. A surfeit of descriptions, a paucity of action. Too much privileging of prose for the sake of prose, too little openness to rougher energies. And those endings? At the…
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What Do I Know of Sorrow?
What have I to complain about? Nothing much. Sylvia Plath would have been eighty-three years old last week; to celebrate her birthday, Brain Pickings shares an eighteen-year-old Plath’s thoughts on her life of privilege, what constitutes “free will,” and both the…
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Are You Sure They Are All Horrid?
Over at Lit Hub, Bridget Reid praises the proto-feminist Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and company, in all of their glory as horrid, formulaic, and dreadfully misunderstood creatures, with a special laundry list of gothic tropes as they can be…
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Inexplicable, and Sometimes Ineffable
All of Everett’s work is, to a greater or lesser degree, satirical; much of it throbs with rage. Percival Everett’s new short story collection, Half an Inch of Water, is out, and Justin Taylor wants you to know that it’s…
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Oh, Crap, I Still Have to Write a Book
Over at the New Yorker, George Saunders maps out his writing education, from Tobias Wolff’s call to his parents’ house to tell him about his acceptance to the Syracuse Creative Writing Program, Doug Unger’s continual excitement and teaching, the loss…