Wednesday, February 10, 2010
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, [...]
Also filed in believer, book review, influential novels, listmania, the future of novels, what's new, writing, etc.
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Tagged imagination, reality, reality hunger, shields, the power of powers, what if, zadie smith
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“Terror keeps you slender.”
“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.”
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
“Watch what you say around writers.”