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 world are not entirely necessary: My big mistakes, I now realize, were to equate adventure […]
...moreFor 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 American tendency to wind up, broken and bloody, in a ditch? Driving a huge metal […]
...moreFor 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 collide.”
...moreFor The Daily Beast, Bill Morris has some theories about why Jim Harrison is an underrated writer.
...morePeople 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 recent triumph: Movies about the civil rights movement — the successful ones– have tended to […]
...moreThree 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 technical writings or reprints of literary classics; only 0.7 percent are first-time translations of fiction […]
...moreWhere 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 that both illuminates and supersedes the present: …technology is changing so fast that there’s no […]
...moreWriting 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 actor — reading my writing was a curious kick, a revelation. The words I was […]
...moreBill 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.
...moreDespite 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 be living in the golden age of sophomore novels, declares Bill Morris over at The […]
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