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 [...]
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 [...]
The Rumpus has an interview I did with the brilliant British novelist David Mitchell. Read it here.
After the interview, he pulled a slim volume from his rucksack and read me his favorite poem in the world, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” by James Wright.
Over my head, I see [...]
Do you like Gary Shteyngart? Who doesn’t? He’s hilarious. Devastatingly handsome. Almost always impeccably dressed. And he’s BFFs with James Franco.
OK, sure, he’s also a pessimist, but a lovable one, as you’ll find out if you read the interview I did with him for The Rumpus:
This generation is fucked. We can’t keep up with the technology [...]
Listen to Faulkner lecture on writing, & read from “The Town.”
I interviewed Jennifer Egan for the great literary online magazine The Rumpus. You can read it in full here, but here’s a teaser:
Look at a book like Tristram Shandy, which is so crazily experimental in a way we still have yet to match. There’s such a desire not to just say: this happened and then this happened [...]
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