The Millions
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On The City And The City
“‘No two persons ever read the same book,’ the writer and critic Edmund Wilson said. Let me expand that sentiment outward into the geography of experience: it seems increasingly clear to me that no two persons live in the same…
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Demanding a Degree of Strangeness
“It might be your own past, or even just the tomb of someone you’d forgotten and who, awakened from the deep slumber of oblivion, comes to life and steps onto the page and, like a magician, plucks out of the…
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Writing, Getting Fired and Resume-Building
“I would be lying of course if I didn’t admit I fell harder than I initially may have thought. The days and weeks following my firing were the first time I admitted to myself that instead of building a Blakeian…
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All I’ve Got Left Are Unread Pages
I like looking at my books and often spend several minutes in the evening running my gaze over them. Most of them I haven’t read but the possibility that I will read them is deeply exciting. (Proust is also excited…
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The Unsettling Visions Of Thomas Disch
“Fantasy is not avoidable. The very act of writing fiction is a sin, a lie. One of Disch’s most haunting stories, ‘Getting Into Death,’ is about a writer (one who uses two pseudonyms, at least one of which Disch used…
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In Defense Of Horror
“How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call ‘unpleasantness’ is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience? Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like…
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Should Dave Eggers Edit The Paris Review?
“Whimsical, highly aestheticized, conspicuously casual, reverent of childhood and its signifiers, bound by the dialectic of irony and sincerity, the style of McSweeney’s has become the style of post-post-Modernism. “It is No One Belongs Here More Than You and Everything…
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You Mean Writing Can’t Be My Career?!
“What the profiles fail to reveal is that the literary apprenticeship is a lengthy one for the majority, that getting published at all is difficult, and to get paid enough to not do anything else but write is virtually a…
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Writing While (Not) Loving, Loving While (Not) Writing
“Edmund Wilson encouraged his second wife Mary McCarthy’s first forays into fiction by shutting her in a room for three hours and asking her to write a story. Author Shirley Jackson’s husband Stanley Hyman, a literary critic and writer for…
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On the Superiority of James Salter
“The first time I read A Sport and a Pastime, just two years ago, I knew I’d experienced something unusual, alive, difficult in its directness; not something to look upon “fondly,” but a story that, like all great art, connected…
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Things To Look Forward To In 2010
“The Notebook is the collected entries from 87-year-old Saramago’s blog, O Caderno de Saramago. The book, ‘which has already appeared in Portuguese and Spanish, lashes out against George W. Bush, Tony Blair, the Pope, Israel and Wall Street,’ according to…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Because I have way too much time on my hands, and because it’s oddly fitting this week, the book blog roundup is in the form of a dialogue between a hopeless writer and his roommate, who is stoned and watching…