The great lit Web site The Rumpus has an intriguing piece about the late, great Barry Hannah. Apparently he was a bit of a WWII buff and gave a lecture at Bennington entitled “Military History as Regards Fiction: The Unquenchable Thirst about World War II.” Man, what I would’ve given to have been there. Brooklyn writer [...]
Quite possibly the most brazenly insubordinate and thought-provoking book I have read since Walter Benjamin‘s landmark essay “The Work of Art In the Age Of Mechanical Reproduction” is David Shields’s highly hyped “manifesto,” Reality Hunger. (Inverted sentence structure intended, BTW.) I don’t know if I am yet prepared to follow Shields into the novels-are-not-really-novels wilderness, [...]
Not the “best,” necessarily, but these are the novels, I think, which will cast the longest shadows to the writers of the future. 2000 Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 2001 Tie: Ian McEwan, Atonement; Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections 2002 Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex 2003 James Frey, A Million Little Pieces (now that we [...]
“A chemist can say how atoms bond. A molecular biologist can say how a mutagen disrupts a chemical bond and causes a mutation. [...] But only a novelist can put all these actors and dozens more into the shared story they all tell, and make that story rearrange some readers’ viscera.”
An interview I did with the novelist Richard Powers (Goldbug Variations, Gain, The Echo Maker), originally published in the February 2007 issue of The Believer, has been reprinted in the new and revised Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. It looks like this:
A review of Denis Johnson‘s new, 25-years-in-the-writing novel, Tree of Smoke, is in the October 2007 edition of The Believer.
A review of Matt Sharpe‘s new novel, JAMESTOWN, was published in the August 2007 edition of The Believer.
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