NPR’s Linda Holmes, on whether pooh-poohing television makes any sense in a changing digital media landscape.
Quotes
Posted inFiction, Quotes
How Michael Cunningham Writes About the Pains, Pleasures, and Psychedelia of Childhood
Michael Cunningham’s short story “White Angel” (The New Yorker; paywalled) is a vibrant masterpiece in miniature about two young brothers in suburban Cleveland pursuing the promises and pleasures of the sixties. Told through the eyes of 9-year-old Robert, the story travels an elegant curve – from the wonder, joy, and power imbalance of the brothers’ […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Writing Is Selection’: John McPhee on the Art of Omission
Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
‘Barbados was Bimshire’: Naomi Jackson’s Debut Novel
In Brooklyn, Barbados was bimshire, a jewel that Bajans turned over in their minds, a candy whose sweetness they sucked on whenever the bitter cold and darkness of life in America became too much to bear. Avril, while she reserved a healthy amount of disdain for Bird Hill and its people, still felt something like […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
On Graywolf Press and the Lyric Essay
Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major […]
Posted inBooks, Quotes, Story
How Mary Karr Teaches Her Students About Memory: A Short Excerpt from ‘The Art of Memoir’
The celebrated memoirist uses a little deception and a judicious ‘fuck’ to make a point.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
The Unsung Women of Rock and Roll
The sensitivity of male egos, the demands of motherhood, and the general disdain for female ambition made loneliness the likely lot of the chick singer. For the young, female rock-and-roll fan, the arm of a male musician might have seemed more welcoming. Girlfriends and wives appeared as fairy-tale heroines who held royal sway in the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Nancy Meyers on Writing a Film Without a Romance
In a conversation with New York magazine, Nancy Meyers talks about her new film The Intern, and why she didn’t want to write another romantic comedy.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
‘Too Strong for That’: Margo Jefferson on Depression as Taboo in Affluent Black America
But one white female privilege had always been withheld from the girls of Negroland. Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘The Loneliest Place for a Writer’: Gary Lutz on Writing (and Rewriting) Great Sentences
Early this summer I attended a disappointing writing workshop where a clearly unprepared instructor stressed the importance of creating air-tight sentences without bothering to suggest how. “Interrogate each one of your sentences,” she kept saying, then referring, over and over, to the first five lines of Lolita. While the overall experience was unsatisfying, it reminded me […]