“I am so sick of being exhorted, as a writer, to improve the world by representing it in a more hopeful way. And the pressure, I feel, is growing, not just from provincial academics such as Friess but from my own peers, whom I witness daily lacerating themselves – perhaps under the influence of the academics who are the only people now able to give them employment – for their moral failings.”
Category: words
Breathing New Life Into Books Long After The Author Dies
“Somewhere between the provocative rethinking of canonical literature and the fan-fiction mashup, there lies the polite posthumous pastiche.”
Oh… So You Thought You Were Supposed To Read Those Books On Your Shelf
“A survey has found that half of an average home’s 138 books go unread. I’m surprised it is as low as a half. Books aren’t meant to be read.”
Loss, Betrayal, and Inaccuracy: A Translator’s Handbook
“If this much loss comes with the translation of a single word, it’s hard to imagine the worlds that are lost with the rendering of an entire novel. But the crucial thing to remember – I often tell myself – is that it doesn’t matter. Loss is invisible; it is what makes it through the net that matters.”
This Year’s PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize Finalists
This year’s judges were Madison Smartt Bell, Manuel Muñoz and Achy Obejas. They considered more than 400 titles published by American authors in 2013.
Longform Writing – Turns Out There’s An Audience For It On The Web
Self-identifying as “longform” has become hot. The start-ups posed an alternative to magazines, which still publish featurettes and front-of-the-book copy, not simply lengthy, in-depth features. The new publications were, by contrast, specialized, and not bound by tradition.
Creative Writing Courses Are a Waste of Time, Says Hanif Kureishi
“A lot of my students just can’t tell a story. They can write sentences but they don’t know how to make a story go from there all the way through to the end without people dying of boredom in between. It’s a difficult thing to do and it’s a great skill to have. Can you teach that? I don’t think you can.”
Creative Writing Courses, On the Contrary, Can Serve Very Useful Purposes
Anna Davis: “I knew this course would give me dedicated time to write, feedback from tutors and fellow students, and that most useful of all things – a deadline.” (Davis does think that a graduate degree in creative writing may not be worth the money.)
‘The Best Six Months of My Writing Life’: Hilary Mantel on Putting Her Cromwell Novels Onstage
“I’ve had so much inspiration from what happens on stage night by night – and I’ve understood things that I don’t think I did understand before about the characters.”
Can You Tell? Game Dares You To Tell Whether The Writer Is Human Or A Machine
“Much like the original Turing tests, designed in the 1950s as a benchmark for machine intelligence, the differences can prove difficult to parse — particularly since certain branches of poetry are intended to sound like an algorithmic jumble, anyway.”