Two things:
I.
A couple weeks ago the Times Book Review complained that a book of nonfiction conflated two dates into one. This week, it reviews David Shields’s Reality Hunger, and has this to say, paraphrasing Shields:
After all, just because the novel is food for worms doesn’t mean that fiction has ceased. Only an artificial dualism would [...]
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Tonight in class I had students write the worst fiction they could. It’s a common exercise, the idea being that it gives us a way to talk about what we value in creative writing and what we abhor. And the writing always ends up surprising and good in complicated ways. I wrote alongside my students, [...]
John D’Agata writes books in and about nonfiction that get me very interested in and excited for the genre. After the first generation of “New Journalists” who just decided to get out and write great, engaging, personal, subjective nonfiction without dickering over the name of this genre, and then after their 2nd-gen acolytes who made [...]
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No, it’s not chlamydia. Nor is it the secret mark he made on his keys over there in the glass bowl by the front door, the one that lets you know which are his. It’s this, from his essay, “Distance and Point of View”:
It is not surprising to hear practicing novelists report that they have [...]
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Here’s another book I want, seen in a well placed ad in the New York Review of Books. Why (and not, please, whether) we care about literary characters is a subject I’m committed enough to to want a read a whole book that finds an answer.
Would you believe it’s $60.00 through Johns Hopkins Press’s site? [...]
Taxidermist Carl Akeley is considered by most taxidermy folks to be the father of modern taxidermy. Taxidermy. Taxidermy taxidermy. Certain words when you write a whole book become very easy to type. Taxidermy. Can’t remember the last time my fingers in that pattern didn’t hit their targets: Taxidermy. Certain words’ meanings begin to fade as [...]
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There’s a new book I want. Well, it’s two books, the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. I like very much my Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which has smart little editorials on words and their usage from Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Stephin Merritt, and other smart people whose opinions I don’t just [...]
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Today the Times’s book review asks Stephen King to review the new biography of utter wretch/mad alcoholic Raymond Carver, who, after taking Carver to task for being such an utter wretch of a mad alcoholic (at a party, he reportedly smashed a wine bottle over the head of his first wife—who seems to have supported [...]
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C.B.’s own bad example of superimposing the past on the present was bad, he said, because it didn’t involve any kind of superimposition at all, merely an interjection. A “flash back” if you will:
Ramona was bored by Baxter’s presentation in the Little Theater. What was he talking about? Lushness, or something. Outside, the grass was [...]
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Earlier this week, C. Baxter came to the UNL English department to talk about style in fiction writing—specifically lushness. Those of you who read this blog who were at Bread Loaf this past summer (tally = 0?) heard this same lecture (and I believe the pretty stunning short story, “Mr. Scary”, he read later in [...]
This weekend N & I were in Oak Island, N.C., where my sister got married. I did the ceremony. You may as well prepare for a long post on all this. It was, maybe, a once-in-a-lifetime event: getting to the write the words that people listen to while they watch a couple ceremonially join their [...]
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The delay in posting has been long. Very sorry. I’ve been waiting jumpily until I could officially announce that my book, The Authentic Animal, has been picked up for publication by St Martin’s Press.
St. Martin’s Press!
I’m way too excited to be able to say much about it. Mostly I don’t know what to do [...]
So I’ve been between novels for a long time now, since June, really, and the other day I grabbed a few things off the shelf to try out. I’ve got the rest of the summer ahead of me, and thought maybe about spending it with another long, long, long books. So I opened Gaddis’s The [...]
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I know it’s gauche to gush, as a small-press publisher, about the books you publish; best to let their brilliance stand representatively alone. But I want to take a minute to talk about how excited we were when Hagel’s story came to The Cupboard’s inbox, and to try to get you to understand why you [...]
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I. Phillip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass
First, the significance of the titular object in this book is unclear, compared to the total mind-blowing weight of the Golden Compass and the Subtle Knife in the first two books. So this object enables the woman who is meant, in theory, to be the serpent of this revisionistic Eden [...]
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Is your community participating in The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts “to revitalize the role of literature in American popular culture and bring the transformative power of literature into the lives of its citizens.” Lincoln, Neb., doesn’t seem to be, though we also have One Book, One Lincoln going [...]
Some things:
I. His Dark Materials
It’s a trilogy that turns Harry-Potter grads into atheists, have you heard? The overarc(h)ing narrative is the quest to kill God. Here’s the thing: it’s so much more godly and Christian than any other book I’ve written. Even if God dies (spoiler alert) in a terribly anticlimactic scene, all three books [...]
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Given what Ball had given The Cupboard, I’d assumed all this time this would be a language-driven book. Or if not a language-driven book, much like something written by a Lish devotee, than an image-driven one. A Ben Marcus novel, or maybe like a Djuna Barnes one.
Imagine my surprise to read this morning a plot-driven [...]
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I’m trying to come up with a list of what I’m belaboringly calling “deuteragonistic narrators”—i.e., first-person narrators who are not the protagonists in their own stories.
Some classic examples:
Nick in The Great Gatsby
Jim in My Ántonia
“we” in “A Rose for Emily”
And that’s all I can come up with. Sorta-kinda DNs can be found in Heart of [...]
