Posts by author
P.E. Garcia
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The Fictional Lives of Fiction Writers
The New Yorker looks at Arctic Summer, Damon Galgut’s fictional account of E.M. Forester writing A Passage into India, and tries to determine what a novel might tell us that a biography can’t.
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The Invisible in Morocco
As a homosexual in Morocco I think that you understand very early that there’s no protection and that no one will defend you. If someone takes your arm and wants to have sex with you, it’s a kind of rape,…
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Philip Roth is a Loser
He has won every other literary prize in the book, including the Man Booker International, the Prix Medicis Etranger, the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, a position of dominance that, in line with European-held stereotypes about his countrymen generally,…
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Conversation Starters
What do Fifty Shades of Grey and Tristram Shandy have in common? They’ve both started a lot of conversations. In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks tries to figure out what separates the books we talk about from…
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A Blundered Blurb
When Jim Ruland got a famous author to agree to blurb his book, he was on top of the world. Then the unthinkable happened: the author read the book and decided he couldn’t blurb it. At Electric Literature, Ruland writes about…
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Crime and Punishment: the Musical!
Coming soon to the Moscow stage: Dostoevsky’s masterwork of darkness, desperation, and brutal murder in the style of musical theatre, reports the Guardian.
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Robots Take Over the Library
In the first step of what will undoubtedly be the robot uprising, two robots will be joining the staff of the Westport, Connecticut library. The robots will primarily assist in teaching coding, but they’re also programmed to recognize faces, practice…
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Pulp Racism
For The Airship, Benjamin Welton looks at the legacy of anti-Asian bigotry in popular fiction over the last century, from Dr. Fu-Manchu to the racist work of Jack London.
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Searching for Something Better than the Best American
David Lehman, series editor for Best American Poetry…dilates on Twitter, “the tyranny of technology,” and the downtrodden humanities…Glenn Stout, in Best American Sports Writing, describes ours as “metric-driven times,” in which we tend to “reduce everything to data—sales figures, ‘starred’…
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Mastering the Short Story
…short stories [are] a venerable form, but it’s diabolically hard to master. There’s a lot of apprenticeship in writing stories. And sometimes a story can take such a long time to write — I mean, months and months. … It’s…
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The Voice of Secondary Trauma
In his review of Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is Too Great, Jess Row writes about the trauma that’s influenced so many of Pakistan’s novelists: Pakistan is a country where the fact of suffering is indeed irrefutable, whether we’re speaking…
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Ted Hughes’s Animals
A new collection called “A Ted Hughes Bestiary” offers selections of Hughes’s animal poems. The Intelligent Life discusses how this work formed “the backbone” of his career.