Posts by author
Victor Luo
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Sneaking into Book Clubs in High-End Neighborhoods
Is it bad that I joined a book club to weasel my way into the fancy homes on the other side of my cul-de-sac? With no intention of reading the books? At the Huffington Post, Jennifer Boyd-Einstein and Paula Mangin…
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Deep Pain and Deep Beauty
Deep pain and deep beauty oscillate throughout Sagawa’s work, often triggered in the same image. “Insects pierce green through the orchard,” she writes in “Like a Cloud.” “The sky has countless scars. The skin of the earth emerges there, burning…
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To All the Novels that Will Never Be Published
There are the sparkling debut novels that become runaway successes; those are few and far between. Then there are the clumsy first novels that get published—good, but primarily a raw first effort on a long and torturous path to becoming…
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The Struggle for Literary Inspiration
Few writers are as prolific as Joyce Carol Oates, and over at the New York Review of Books, she masterfully tackles the concept of inspiration throughout an impressive span of literary history, covering Plato, Dickinson, Joyce, Woolf, James. Her take?…
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Vehicles of Literary Inspiration
For the past century American writers and artists have been obsessed with that shimmering, sexy, liberating, lethal contraption known as the automobile…Is there a more potent metaphor for American restlessness, for the American hunger for status and sex, for the…
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Literary Life in Los Angeles Today
We are not just an entertainment industry city; there are artists and engineers and teachers and restaurateurs and civil servants and so many more people in the city who want more than to build a perfect body and network with…
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What Not to Say Around Writers
Writers have heard it all from readers, non-readers, strangers who question if books are still relevant, acquaintances who sigh about how nice it must be to stay home all day and write. Several popular authors have taken to Twitter to…
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All Things Weird and Literary
We can toss around “sci-fi,” “fantasy,” “magical realism,” “surrealism,” and a dozen other genres in our struggle to categorize literature, but the term “weird fiction” is an interesting category that attempts to encapsulate a unifying element. Over at Lit Hub, Tobias Caroll…
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The Poetic Power of Pedestrians
By merely wandering, the dérivist frustrates the spatial logic of capitalism, in the process discovering new currents, fissures, and vortices of possibility within a deeply familiar space. Wandering and drifting have long been championed as means of inspiration, but how…
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All of Wikipedia, In Print
We all know the rise of Wikipedia and its always-accessible treasure trove of information was the decisive nail-in-the-coffin for those dusty, hardcover encyclopedia sets. But for the people behind Print Wikipedia, there’s the desire to collect all of Wikipedia (at…
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Literature of Endurance
A shrewd observer of titles that dominate the bestseller list week after week will notice the plethora of books about overcoming harrowing events or difficult trials. Over at the Financial Times, Ed Caesar weighs in on our readerly obsessions on stories…
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Grief Turned Into Writing
Trauma brought me to the page, it is that simple. It’s a familiar story to hear writers becoming inspired over suffering, but it’s rare to read about it with precision. Over at The Millions, Lidia Yuknavitch writes with startling clarity…