alec michod

Writers are, first and foremost, diehard readers. We inhale books, salivate on certain sentences. Sometimes we even froth at the mouth when we encounter a particularly brilliant word–an enjambment of sense and sensibility.
Books, in one sense, are objects–ink printed on paper bound together and stamped with a stylish cover. But they’re also, particularly to us [...]

I started cleaning out a closet over the weekend. Digging through one of many unruly boxes filled with old manuscripts, I came across a story I wrote in grad school, a thinly veiled piece of autobiographical fiction, meant to be woven seamlessly into a grossly corpulent novel I later gutted and eventually abandoned, about my [...]

Legs forked upside down bicycling the air,
Hands craned and arched–a stilled Tonka–your
Spearheaded head radished, shot back
In these awkward, torqued semi-spasms
That keep pressing your poised nose
Down drilling the wooden, recently redone
Floor. Its geometric body snaps shut. Sure,
Killer, it takes getting used to–your own
Body–the elastic stretching, pants plastic
And girdling your beer-a-day potbelly, its
Discombobulated quasi-Cubist fit. It
Hurts, [...]

Sadly, one of my professors at the University of Chicago, pioneering silent-film theorist Miriam Hansen, has passed away, far, far too young. Her work proposes a new take on cinema and theories of modernity and mass culture, or what she calls the notion of “vernacular modernism.”

Last year, she taught a PhD seminar on the “fate [...]

Sometimes, a lot of times, actually, when you’re writing fiction–long or short, but especially long–it seems like no matter how much you write, you’re not writing the right thing. You’re writing yourself in circles, in fact, slowly driving yourself–and everyone around you, whether they signed up for this nor not, more likely the latter–bat-shit crazy.
Case [...]

The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa, begins thus:
That was a fabulous summer. Pérez Prado and his twelve- professor orchestra came to liven up the Carnival dances at the Club Terrazas of Miraflores and the Lawn Tennis of Lima; a national mambo championship was organized in Plaza de Acho, which was a great success in [...]

(via Kostbarkeitan & Plunder)

Jonathan Franzen, whose new novel Freedom I have devoured rapaciously and loved, gave a great interview to NPR. Among the treasures:
Only if you have some regular connection with some kind of darkness or difficulty or conflict does serious fiction begin to matter. And so it’s simply realistic to let people, as the stories of their [...]