Posts by author
Victor Luo
-
The Enduring Ordinariness of Parisian Life
We’re defiant, but shaky. We can’t get over what we’ve seen, what we’ve heard, who we’ve lost, and we don’t really want to. But we’ll eventually get used to the fact that it happened. It will become part of our…
-
Raymond Chandler’s Writing Legacy
What greater prestige can a man like me (not too greatly gifted, but very understanding) have than to have taken a cheap, shoddy and utterly lost kind of writing, and have made of it something that intellectuals claw each other…
-
On Writing While in Prison
Over at Hazlitt, Sarah Gerard interviews Matthew Seger, who is currently incarcerated in a maximum security prison, and reveals what it’s like to keep up a writing discipline behind bars: Before, if I wanted to write something down, I’d scribble…
-
Lit Theorists for Babies
WOMAN: Peekabo! I see you! Peekaboo! I see you! BABY DERRIDA: How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? Over at The Toast, Mallory Ortberg has another entry, this…
-
The Influence of the Author Photo
There’s a moment not often talked about in the reading process: turning to the cover flap and seeing the face of the story’s creator. It’s a reminder that the story didn’t appear out of thin air, that a real flesh-and-bones…
-
The Writer’s Voice on Social Media
Voice is not a commodity but the slow accretion of individual perspective. This is a writer’s most valuable asset… Social media isn’t a distraction from the seriousness of what he’s published. It’s an affirmation of his argument’s importance. Authors today…
-
The Comparative Value of Books and their Adaptations
As adapting book series for lucrative movie deals becomes an all-too-common sight these days, it might be easy to simply fall back on the bookworm’s argument that the books are better than their film counterparts. But how do the reviews…
-
If Writers Were Baseball Players
With giddiness over the National League Championship, Lit Hub imagines the amusing fantasy lineup of players if the baseball teams were made up entirely of writers. Pitting Jennifer Egan and George Saunders against Malcolm Gladwell and Alice Munro, the list…
-
Memorable Beasts in Books
Over at Lit Hub, Lincoln Michel offers us a wonderful list of books that prominently feature animals in strange and interesting ways. You won’t find Watership Down or Moby-Dick on this list (too obvious!).
-
The President Chats Up Marilynne Robinson
We already know that President Obama is a well-read man, his trips to the bookstore always yielding stacks of books to devour, and now he tries his hand at interviewing one of his favorite authors, Marilynne Robinson. The New York…
-
Reinventing Myth and Genre for Fiction
Fables and fairy tales and folk tales can compel us on their own, but they’re also ripe for reinvention. Some authors may take the skeleton of a centuries-old story and use it as the basis for something new; others may…
-
Graphic Novels, Fatherhood, and Asian-American Culture
I feel like I’m just a hair’s breadth away from a consensus that what I do is horrible. Guernica has a wonderful interview with graphic novelist Adrian Tomine, whose latest book Killing and Dying was recently released. Tomine talks about…