writing
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What Happened During The Blackout
Just when I thought I was unique, just as I’ve been spending the last six-odd months editing a short story about the misadventures of retail workers during a city-wide blackout (Santa Cruz, circa 2002) I read today that actually everyone…
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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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Cars are Always Funny and So are Landlords and Sex
“The affect, here, stems from the naive individual’s skewed encounter with systems larger than himself, an encounter which, reprised again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that life should be reshaped into a self-repeating mechanism (it’s no…
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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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Things Not To Do In Your Debut Novel
“To sit down to read a novel is a mere fraction of the commitment required to write one, but in both cases the commitment must be made, and it needs to be driven by something very deep: What is essential…
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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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This Dictionary Has Oral Sex In It!
I just learned from Jacket Copy that “Menifee school district in Riverside County has removed the 10th edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from all school shelves after a parent complained about a student running across “oral sex” in its pages.”…
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Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
This week, Rumpus books published pieces about fucking and writing, A Common Pornography, and Folksy Fruit. Also, there was an interview with Jonathan Lethem.
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Fucking and Writing: The Rumpus Conversation with Jami Attenberg
“Perhaps we should talk about fucking. Fucking and writing, fucking and talking, fucking and thinking, fucking and whatever else it is that fucking goes with…”
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A Bosnian Novelist And An Irish Novelist Walk Into A Bar
If you have any doubts about the power of the novel, or its lasting cultural significance, or its transcendent ability to deepen and enrich our chaotic earthly experiences, look no further than this impassioned conversation at The Believer between two…
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The Bravery Of Uncertainty
“When you’re not religious, sacredness means something that fills you with awe. The creation of something awe-striking requires a pure offering, an opening up to the universe. It’s not always an act of risk, that could land you “in the…
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Grief And Hamlet
“My grief has been all the usual and varied colours of sadness and madness. It has been searing, voluptuous, numbing. I foresaw that it would be — I have been unhappy, unsettled, unbalanced before (who has not?). I did not…