Notable NYC: 4/7–4/13
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
...morePosts Tagged: laura miller
Where Writers Rule
At Slate, Laura Miller discusses the TV showrunner as novelist, focusing specifically on Noah Hawley. Hawley, showrunner for the FX show Fargo, has also published multiple novels, including Before the Fall: By contrast, the flawed, struggling, conflicted male characters in both seasons of Fargo register as real people, despite the darkly farcical tone the series takes […]
...moreThe Dreamer Gazing
Using examples like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Laura Miller analyzes our modern concept of what an “allegory” is, in comparison to how the word has historically been used to describe literature, and how it originated: Allegorical reading requires sustaining both image and meaning in the reader’s mind, as […]
...moreRooted Elsewhere
Most of the rest of the stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are linked, with major characters in one story later turning up as minor characters in another. This loose, multiracial, polymorphously perverse, generation-spanning cast lives mostly in present-day England, but they have roots elsewhere. Anton grew up in “a country that’s not even sure […]
...moreNo New Friends
A connection so fundamentally optional doesn’t provide the same ambivalence and tension you get with alcoholic parents, narcissistic spouses, or resentful bosses. If your friend abuses you or your trust, you can just walk away. Slate’s Laura Miller explains why nobody writes memoirs about their friends, and then looks at two recent books that take […]
...moreFan Fiction Gone Wild
Slate’s Laura Miller details the bizarre tale of the copyright lawsuit between two No. 1 New York Times best-selling fantasy authors, showing the potential messiness of fan fiction going mainstream: If these tropes sound familiar to you, you’re not alone. After the Guardian wrote about the suit, my own social media feeds filled up with […]
...moreExhausted, Frustrated, Probably Depressed
The housewife is to the novelist what the still life is to the painter. For the Slate Book Review, Laura Miller writes a piece exploring the history and resurgence of a beloved literary archetype: the housewife, often made profound by great writers from Flaubert to Jenny Offill.
...moreWriting on Old Age
For Slate, Laura Miller reviews the way old age is explored and rendered through literature, especially by those of old age themselves: The essays in Alive, Alive Oh! resolve in a stubbornly untidy fashion; Athill rejects the unspoken, oppressively conventional “wisdom” that dominates the personal essay today. “My two valuable lessons are: avoid romanticism and abhor […]
...moreThe Complexities of Litchat
Laura Miller writes in the New Yorker about litchat and legacy: In fact, litchat has assumed an ever-greater role in criticism because so much of what once happened privately and fleetingly is now public and preserved. Social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the main sites where this litchat happens today, and conversations on both […]
...moreWord of the Day: Miasma
(n.); noxious exhalations from putrid organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere; a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere “If the Internet is a bridge to the greater world, a troll is the beast who lives under it, extracting a toll in hurt feelings, outraged sensibilities and fear from all who pass.” […]
...moreIf It Quacks like a Dragon
Kazuo Ishiguro insists his new novel, The Buried Giant, is not a fantasy novel. Laura Miller at Salon agrees. Ursula K. Le Guin does not (and is a little insulted). David Barnett at The Guardian doesn’t care either way and instead sees Ishiguro’s novel as an opportunity: Why not throw open the gates, tear down […]
...moreBetween the Lines
While some bibliophiles hold books as sacred artworks to be carefully preserved, others can’t read without a little back-and-forth. Laura Miller makes a case for defacing pages: Marginalia is a blow struck against the idea that reading is a one-way process, that readers simply open their minds and the great, unmediated thoughts of the author […]
...moreTrue Lies
At Salon, Laura Miller covers a recent update in the ongoing criticism of—and legal proceedings involving—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Ronald Nye, the son of Harold Nye, a former agent for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation who has since died, can finally publish his father’s documents. These notes that he kept during the case present […]
...moreA History of the New York Times Notable Books
For Salon, Laura Miller dug through two decades’ worth of the New York Times Notable Books to see how the list has evolved over the years.
...moreNotes on Self
At Salon, Laura Miller rebukes Will Self’s criticism of George Orwell at the BBC, arguing that the British novelist has misinterpreted “Politics and the English Language.” She emphasizes the importance that, in his essay, Orwell discussed political writing and did not suggest his “rules” apply to fiction.
...moreMurakami’s Un-American Talents
Laura Miller, writing at Salon, argues that Haruki Murakami has a simple and often understated skill that American writers lack (or at least, aren’t willing to pursue): how he tramples “the coyness and elision that plagues so much…literary fiction on the same themes” in the United States.
...moreThe Salinger Year
My time at the Agency and reading Salinger brought me back to that state when you’re a kid or an adolescent – or just a person! – who reads for pleasure. I was able to go back to the pre-academic me who fully understood the actual pure power of literature to change a person’s life, […]
...moreAn English Writer on an American Ship in the Persian Gulf
Geoff Dyer has a new book out, Another Great Day at the Sea, written during a two-week writing residency on the USS George H.W. Bush in the Persian Gulf. Over at Salon, Laura Miller explores what it was like for the “neurotic” British author to spend time writing aboard an American military ship.
...moreNo Reading Necessary
Literary history has two sides, I think. One is the normative side: deciding what is good and what is less good. The other is the explanatory side. It’s two very different modalities of thought, and I’ve always been inclined toward the explanatory. That’s what fires my mind. And in the study of the humanities, the […]
...moreRe-Live Litquake’s digi.lit Conference
If you couldn’t make it to Litquake’s digi.lit conference, never fear—you can listen to Laura Miller’s keynote address here. Though the conference focused on digital publishing, the Salon writer talks just as much about traditional publishing and how it has given readers what they want in a way digital publishing hasn’t quite figured out yet, despite […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Laura Miller
In 1995, a small group of writers and editors met to plan Salon. Laura Miller, who became employee number 5, was involved in creating the prototype.
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