Posts by author
P.E. Garcia
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The History of the Chapter
Books have been written or arranged in chapters for over two millennia now, although that fact has never received the attention it deserves from historians of the written word. Perhaps the sheer longevity of the concept has rendered it invisible.…
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Two Sides to Some Stories
Because we’re not expecting it, because the diptych hasn’t yet become a tired form in narrative, I think the diptych challenges and transforms traditional narrative, that is, story built around the arc of beginning, middle, and end. For The American…
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A 21st Century Literary Movement
In the Guardian, Damien Walter discusses what he thinks might be the first major literary movement of the 21st century: transrealism, the genre of literature that rejects “consensus reality.”
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The Miniature Canon
Historically, the genre has involved lots of religious tracts, some erotica, and various improving volumes. But cat literature forms a not-inconsiderable part of the canon. The Paris Review delves into the feline-filled world of miniature books.
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Lord Byron was the Original Vampire
On the same night that Mary Shelley released Frankenstein’s monster, John Polidori, Lord Byron’s personal physician, wrote “The Vampyre,” the first fully realized English vampire story. The Public Domain Review takes a look at how Byron served as the model…
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Antique Doodles
The owner of another fabulous volume, the Book of St Albans – a gentleman’s guide to heraldry, hawking and hunting that, in the 1480s, was the first colour printed book in English – did worse and with much less shame:…
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Raymond Chandler’s LA
A new map of Los Angeles highlights points of interest from Raymond Chandler’s books and films. Electric Literature has all the details.
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The Joy of Someone Else Reading Your Writing
Writing is its own form of music. And though I had read my novel aloud to myself many times and had read passages of it aloud to dozens of audiences on my book tour, hearing another person — a trained…
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Calvino’s New York
Sometimes I worry that New York changes too quickly. I find myself clinging to things, silly things I wouldn’t have imagined, like the Kentile Floors sign or Joe’s Superette. “Brooklyn as brand has overtaken Brooklyn as place,” I remember reading…
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What Makes Editors Fall in Love?
There is this (correct) notion that the world is speeding up of late, that we no longer have the attention spans to wait for a story to get going. But even decades ago, Elia Kazan, award-winning director and novelist, said…
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The Year of Reading Women
For the New York Times, Alexander Chee reflects on Joanna Walsh’s effort to get people to read only women during 2014 and the revelations female writers have given him.
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The Art of the Office Novel
Office fiction is deliberately and narrowly construed as being about manners, sociability, gossip, the micro-struggles for rank and status—in other words, “office politics”—rather than about the work that is done in offices. In Dissent, Nikil Saval writes about white-collar alienation…