Several Short Sentences About Writing reminded me of the The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Klinkenborg the listmaker enumerates all the perks and preconditions that a writer might need to create.…
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Lottie is 19. Over the breakfast table she announces she’s getting married. Nobody knew she had a boyfriend. She didn’t really.…
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When Khady realized that her husband of three years might be dead, racing next door for help with tears streaming down her eyes, she still for a moment thought about how this was a wasted opportunity for her to conceive her first child.…
Read MoreThere’s been lamentation in the streets about the abandonment of book coverage by many newspapers. The economic model of publishing a newspaper is troubled in our time.…
Read MoreI’ve always assumed that the reviews voted most helpful on Amazon are positive reviews. And it’s also true that among amateur book reviewers, a critical review is unlikely.…
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I had thought that the third person narrative voice was prosaic, the most obvious way to tell a story. But it’s like having a dozen eggs in your kitchen.…
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Norah is sitting behind the wheel in a state. Her live-in boyfriend, Jakob, is beside her. The kids, one offspring from each partner are in the back seat.…
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Pat Barker writes historical fiction about the World War I period in England that doesn’t descend into formulaic genre. One key to her literary success is her gift for unlocking complex people.…
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You may have read the same newspaper article that I did, a few years ago, about the elderly woman in Athens who was eaten by her cats.…
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I don’t know why but it’s often the big glossy library sets in my bookcases that go untouched. While interspersed among them are these battered old trade paperbacks that I couldn’t bear to get rid of.…
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When I was a child we had pre-electronic Christmases. My parents always gave good gifts. What they lacked in resources they made up for with heart.…
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DH: In the 80’s I worked for a company in Brooklyn in a neighborhood that is probably now unrecognizable due to gentrification.…
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It’s worthwhile to engage a film or story that’s emotionally difficult. For years I avoided John Ford’s 1940 film version of The Grapes of Wrath.…
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The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham consists of seven associated stories which are all called “The News from Spain”.There’s an opening quote from Robert Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony…in diverging stories, all others are reflected.…
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My New Yorker subscription is hanging by a thread. One of the lifelines that keeps it going is the frequent appearance in its pages of the short stories of Tessa Hadley.…
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In October of 2012 Europa Editions will release My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I consider that a publishing event since My Brilliant Friend is the first novel in a trilogy.…
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Benjamin Wood’s debut novel, The Bellwether Revivals, which has garnered considerable praise in the U.K., goes on-sale in the U.S. this week.…
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DH: Joshua, I think you decided at an early point that The World Without You would take place in a single weekend and almost at a single place, the Frankel homestead in Lenox, Massachusetts.…
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Let’s start with the title: The World Without You. It’s tantalizingly ambiguous. It’s unclear who is making the reference or to whom the reference is addressed.…
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DH: Having just read through Benjamin Wood’s interview on his debut novel, The Bellwether Revivals, I find that I like this gracious writer, if possible, even more than I already do.…
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It takes a measure of bravery to read a book. You can never be sure what you are going to encounter.…
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If you can’t, as a writer, delineate a relationship in a single sentence, then you can’t do it if you take three hundred lines.…
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The House on Paradise Street was published in March by Short Books. I’ve never heard of the press but they look to be a small press based in London.…
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Francois Vigneault is editor at an innovative and maverick press, Scout Books / Good Ink, which is based in cool, counter-cultural and utterly green Portland, one of my favorite places.…
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