British Insecurity
Among those who bemoaned the change of rules were a number of British novelists. Why did they assume their American counterparts were better? Or if they thought Americans were just…
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novels
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Cheever House
John Cheever is the quintessential suburban novelist. The New Yorker has the story behind the writer’s Ossining, New York house that inspired many of the stories of middle-class, suburban woe.
The Art of Homage
But what if your entire book is based on another one? What if a certain piece of information (in the cases of these books, a writer or a specific novel)…
Notes 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…
Novels Are a Long Time Coming
Contrary to the mission of National Novel Writing Month, most novels take far longer to complete, as stay-at-home dad Ryan McSwain learned when he set out to write his first…
Books Grow Longer
Several recent high profile books, like Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries or Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, are hefty tomes. As it turns out, these outliers are part of a larger trend…
Weekly Geekery
Do video games undermine empathy? Or are they just a comfortable scapegoat for a violent culture? Scientists search for an evolutionary reason for art. Spoiler alert: The answer is men…
Dr. Critic and Mr. Novelist
Can a good critic be a good novelist too? Daniel Mendelsohn and Leslie Jamison, who both have written both fiction and non-fiction, answer this question in the weekly Bookend column for the…
The Literary Novel is Dead! Long Live the Literary Novel!
It happens every now and then that we find someone toasting (or mourning) the death of the novel—this time, it’s Will Self’s turn. “How do you think it feels to…
Figuring Out What Essays Are
What’s the difference between an essay and a novel? Teju Cole considered that question in his 2012 essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” writing that essays have points, while novels do…
Twelve Years, One Book Later
Another testament to the tribulations of novel-making: over at the New Yorker, Akhil Sharma discusses the particular technical problems he faced while writing Family Life as well as how, exactly, he…
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…