This post appeared on Andrew’s Book Club during Short Story Month–May, 2011. I’m reposting (with revision) in June because that’s how slowly this blog moves.
Who said that first? I’ve been repeating it for years. I’d tattoo it up one arm… … Read moreFIRST get your character up a tree. Then throw stones at him.
I wrote my own book of linked stories by accident.
It started with one story about a girl named Leah, age 11. It was my first short story and took four months to write (not enough time, as it turned out), and took place in the basement of her building in New York City. When… … Read more
My friend Natalie Baszile and I are studying Away, a novel of such narrative thrust that only on reread, pen in one hand and phone in the other, are we starting to understand how complex it is, how many things Amy Bloom is doing at once.
We’re not going at this systematically, just passionately. Natalie… … Read more
My mother sometimes phones to read me a line or a passage, often from The New York Times; and when I was a reporter in my twenties, she called to read me enslaved by the scent of lilac. She savored the idea of a passerby bound to a lilac bush by invisible ropes of scent.
Enslaved… … Read more
I’m rereading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because my brain deletes all critical data on some mysterious schedule. So I just had the great pleasure of remembering (again) that the first chapter is a collection of sensory impressions that alter as Stephen matures. Meaning: as his brain changes neurologically from a… … Read more
“Either you see a picture immediately,” Cezanne told the writer Joachim Gasquet, “or you never see it at all.
Explanations don’t help a bit. What good does it do to comment on it? All those things are imperfect, imprecise things. We talk as we do because it’s amusing, like drinking a good bottle of wine.… … Read more