My reading became frightfully promiscuous from then on and remains only slightly less so today. I was moved to write (or try to) by The World According to Garp and Under the Volcano. These two books should not be read by an earnest young writer in the same summer. I remember the searing experience of discovering Blood Meridian and wondering how I would ever learn to write with McCarthy’s thundering cadences.
I was somewhere between being indefinitely alone, and finding someone, when a copy of Birds of America came along, actually two copies. I had just broken up with a girl I had no business breaking up with when I gave her my extra copy of Birds of America as a kind of bonus for letting me break up with her. I never read the book, and until last night, never read Lorrie Moore. There is no good reason why this gap in my reading history exists, but there it is.
Maria is a badass. How many people would walk away from a lucrative television writing gig (for such shows as Arrested Development) for the opportunity to toil away in the dying business of novel writing? Maria did just that. How many people would buy you two strollers, a baby seat, buy you a splashy dinner every single time you saw her, and give you a thousand bucks when your royalty check was late? Or offer the use of her house for as long as you needed it? Maria has done all of these things for her writer friends.
A couple of weeks ago, we posted Greg Olear’s essay for the When We Fell In Love series, in which he wrote about The Sun Also Rises. Around the same time, we posted D. R. Haney’s WWFIL about William Faulkner. Over at The Nervous Breakdown, we had quite a few comments preferring one author or the other for various reasons; I fell in behind Uncle Bill, but admittedly hadn’t read any Hemingway since high school, aside from the stray short story.
I agree with the author, large companies who have interests that don’t seem to fit the idea of democracy, are ruling the world, in a take no prisoners fashion, the rich get rich, and the poor, well, fuck you. Make money, and squash employee’s souls, or as the old whorehouse ideal goes, either lie down and get fucked, or get up and leave. Aidan, through his search for Paige, goes through his life, step by step, and finds that he’s unknowingly already involved, and the further he gets, the worse it gets, and to be honest, isn’t that how life is?
I read everything by Philip Roth, even if his obsession with young women is getting a bit shabby, and I wish he’d give us a glimmer of humor, a flicker of hope now and then but he’s already given me so much I shouldn’t complain, The Anatomy Lesson and The Professor of Desire, The Human Stain and The Dying Animal, all great, all beautiful, so I’ll keep reading him till I’m old (older) and possibly as incontinent as one of his recent characters.
Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich
When We Fell In Love – Helen Sedwick
When We Fell In Love – Helen Sedwick
The Delivery Cut Download
Our Frail Blood by Peter Nathaniel Malae