Tim Parks
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Conversation Starters
What do Fifty Shades of Grey and Tristram Shandy have in common? They’ve both started a lot of conversations. In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks tries to figure out what separates the books we talk about from…
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Critics vs. Copies
Have you actually read Knausgaard or have you only read about Knausgaard? The sales numbers don’t seem to support the phenomenon that this Norwegian writer has become. For the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks tries to understand the correlation…
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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 and sex. How does widespread surveillance effect art and free…
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On Changing Things
Over at the New York Review of Books blog, Tim Parks gives us a short, historical narrative concerned with the ways in which our changing attention spans have altered our reading experiences, as well what forms of literature we are…
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“The Woes of the Wannabe”
The prospect of publication, the urgent need, as they see it, to publish as soon as possible, colors everything [my students] do….It will be hard for those who have never suffered this obsession to appreciate how all-conditioning and all-consuming it…
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Trapped Inside the Novel
My problem with the grand traditional novel—or rather traditional narrative in general, short stories included—is the vision of character, the constant reinforcement of a fictional selfhood that accumulates meaning through suffering and the overcoming of suffering. At once a palace…
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Why We Write About What We Write About
At the New York Review of Books‘s blog, Tim Parks explores how authors might subconsciously get inspiration for their novels from unresolved personal conflicts. Specifically, he reflects on the lives of Chekhov and Faulkner, making connections between their real-life hardships and the…
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English Takeover
Tim Parks writes on the tensions between lingua franca and vernacular—readers and writers don’t want to be confined to the limits of their national origin, while wanting to keep the vernacular-specific prose. There’s always translation, but is there an English…
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The Boring, Unplayful, Unoriginal Global Novel
“What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international…
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“Shakespeare would have eased off the puns”
“What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way…