I liked this bit from Susan Sontag’s journals. Apparently, the LitHub post from whence this came was in violation of something, so it’s gone. Rules for Being a Writer from Sontag’s journals, December 3, 1961 The writer must be four people: The nut, the obsédé The moron The stylist The critic 1 supplies the material; … Read more
I know I’m not the first to notice that lots of recently-authored books seem more like a verbose screenplay written in prose than a novel. This seems to especially be the case with genre books. I recently finished the first book in an acclaimed new fantasy series, the Draconis Memoria trilogy. The Waking Fire is … Read more
Shame is now both global and permanent, to a degree unprecedented in human history. No more moving to the next town to escape your bad name. However far you go and however long you wait, your disgrace is only ever a Google search away. Getting a humiliating story into the papers used to require convincing … Read more
The elements of Christie’s fiction are all already in place: a country house, a finite list of suspects, the outsider detective intruding into a place of order and hierarchy that has been disrupted by a crime. The world of Christie’s books is something like the ‘imaginary’ as described by Cornelius Castoriadis, a mental representation in … Read more
Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist … Read more