Publishing asks women — but not men — to be nice, as well as talented. Should we ask men to be more nice, or give women the leeway to be less so?
writers
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Jenny Diski Remembers Doris Lessing: Why Can’t People Be Sensible?
Jenny Diski remembers Doris Lessing’s unemotional approach to motherhood and life.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Bona-Fide Celebrities: Nikki Finke on the Late ’80s ‘Literary Brat Pack’
In 1987, a young Nikki Finke profiled the “Literary Brat Pack” (choice Brat Pack members included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, of Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City fame, respectively) for The Los Angeles Times.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
James Salter on Writing and the Open Road
The author’s 1992 interview with poet Edward Hirsch.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Thoughts on a Gentrifying San Francisco, In Honor of His 96th Birthday
Fifty years later, he awoke one fine morning like Rip Van Winkle, and found himself again with his sea bag on his shoulder looking for anywhere he could live and work. The new owner of his old flat now wanted $4,500 a month, and many of his friends were also evicted, for it seemed their buildings weren’t owned by San Franciscans anymore, but by faceless investors with venture capital. Corporate monoculture had wiped out any unique sense of place, turning the “island city” into an artistic theme park without artists. And he was on the street.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Jeffrey Eugenides Imagines His Favorite Writers Together at a Dinner Party
The waiter arrives. When he asks about food allergies, Kafka hands him a written list. Then he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. As soon as he’s gone, Kundera says, “The problem with Kafka is that he never got enough tail.” We all snicker. Joyce orders another bottle of wine. Finally, he turns and looks at me through his dark glasses. “I’m reading your new book,” he says. “Oh?” I say. “Yes,” says Joyce.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Truman Capote Compiled the Guest List for His Famous Black and White Ball, According to Gloria Steinem
What gave the Black and White Ball “its intoxicating piquancy,” according to Amy Fine Collins, was the fact that Capote’s guest list had “flung together, in a gilt-edged melting pot, the most alluring power brokers in the worlds of high society, politics, the arts, and Hollywood—disconnected universes that collided, if not for the first time that evening, then at least with unprecedented force.”
The Ball also found an unlikely chronicler in Gloria Steinem, an invited guest who had made Capote’s acquaintance after she interviewed him for Glamour the year before. Steinem wrote a feature on the party for Vogue in January 1967 in which she described the luminaries, feathers, masks, ball gowns, and jewels all whirling around the room: “The effect was like some blend of Hollywood, the Court of Louis XIV, a medieval durbar, and pure Manhattan.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Literary Agent to Authors: Take the Money
Guernica: Is there ever a situation where you’d advise an author not to take a big advance that’s being offered? Chris Parris-Lamb: No, not really. Which is not the same as saying they should always take the biggest advance that’s being offered. But I’d never advise an author to turn down an advance because it’s […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Ernest Hemingway’s Private WWII-Era Spy Network
During World War II Hemingway organized a private spy network, which he jokingly called the Crook Factory, and gathered information about Nazi sympathizers on the island. But in a secret, 124-page report on Hemingway, the FBI—which feared his personal prestige and political power—expressed resentment at his amateur but alarming intrusion into their territory, and unsuccessfully […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Think of This as a Window: Remembering the Life and Work of Maggie Estep
“I moved to Lower Manhattan when I was seventeen. The only things I cared about were books and music.”