bill morris
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Adventures Are Overrated
For The Millions, Bill Morris wonders what value adventures and life experiences have on writing good fiction. While at first Morris is convinced that adventure is necessary to write quality work, Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners convinces him that travel and exploring the…
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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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A Treacherous Crossroads
For The Millions, Bill Morris reflects on the documentary Havana Motor Club, and his own trip to Cuba in 1998, noting how the country is now getting “ready to navigate a treacherous crossroads—the place where communism and capitalism intersect and…
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The Rodney Dangerfield of Literature
For The Daily Beast, Bill Morris has some theories about why Jim Harrison is an underrated writer.
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Getting It Right
People have been writing about civil rights for years, but it’s taken Hollywood until now to warm up to the subject (of course, not enough). Bill Morris traces the history of the movement’s cinematic representations leading up to Ava DuVernay’s…
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Lost in Translation
Three Percent, a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester, derives its name from the fact that about 3 percent of all the books published in the U.S. every year are translations. But the bulk of these are…
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Back to the Present
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? By the time we’ve figured it out, we’ve already gotten there. Examining a trend toward futuristic fiction, Bill Morris looks at the near future as a literary setting…
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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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The Road to Publication
Bill Morris and Edan Lepucki both have novels coming out soon. Over at The Millions, they have a conversation about the journey those novels took from conception, to editing, to publishing.
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The Golden Age of Second Novels
Despite the challenges writers face with debut novels, the second novel is generally considered the most difficult to write. Some second novels fail to exceed the first, and plenty of authors never even write a second novel. But we might…