Tim Parks
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Countries, Languages, and Writing
But what about those writers who move to another country and do not change language, who continue to write in their mother tongue many years after it has ceased to be the language of daily conversation? Do the words they…
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The Prison House of English
For the NYRB, Tim Parks meditates on writing in English through investigating various authors who made switches from native tongues to the more economically viable lingua franca, like Nabokov and Conrad—or who did the exact opposite, like Jhumpa Lahiri—all in effort to…
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Read and Then Read Again
How do we reread and is it necessary? Tim Parks demystifies the art of going back to a text for the third, fourth and fifth time.
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Word of the Day: Oblivescence
(n.); the process of forgetting; “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. When we read a book for the first time, the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after…
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The Living Dead Author
How is it possible that even when I know nothing about a novelist’s life I find, on reading his or her book, that I am developing an awareness of the writer that is quite distinct from my response to the…
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It’s Time to Rethink Everything
At Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon presents an excerpt of Tim Parks’s new book, Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of Books. In the excerpted section, Parks questions the simple idea of what “we want from writing.”
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Seeing What We Read
More banally we may stand at the luggage collection carousel watching endless bags tumble onto the belt. We hold in our minds a shadowy idea of our own bag. Then suddenly it is there and the effort of “visualizing” ceases.…
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Too Many Books
…it’s hard not to feel that we are in an era of massive overproduction. Just when we were already overwhelmed with paper books, often setting them aside after only a few pages in anxious search of something more satisfying, along…
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Surviving Success
Joyce relentlessly made things more and more difficult for readers, as if success actually prevented him from producing more of the same, so determined was he to be nobody’s servant. Hence the lucid and fluent Dubliners becomes the more difficult…
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How Should A Person Read?
While Tim Parks doesn’t want to be prescriptive, he offers his own techniques as inspiration: Getting a sense of the values around which the story is organizing itself isn’t always easy; I might change my mind two or three times.…
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What’s New?
For the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks writes about why we should read new books, when there’s so many “classics…available at knockdown prices”: As a reviewer of books she would often pan, Virginia Woolf thought one of the…
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One and The Same
Nosy readers often delight in sleuthing out the parallels between an author’s work and their life, as if an identifiable autobiographical source might change the meaning behind the words. So what happens when authors eliminate the boundary altogether? By calling…