"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." — Stephen King
At 771 pages, this is a long novel. Is it worth it? Many of the 57 commentators on the Kirkus review didn’t think so. However, I love the way Tartt develops big themes. And she has sentences that are works of art. The NY Times review, written by Stephen … Read More
Uniquely in America, there is “a desire to understand in the heat of living,” says Natalie Goldberg in her book about the practice of writing memoir. Don’t think of memoirs as records of events. Instead, think of it as a chance to make sense of your life and search for … Read More
This passage from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” based on the character in Homer’s Odyssey, continues: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and ever when I move. How dull it is to pause.” Indeed! How dull the world would be without fine … Read More
Peter Taylor, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Penn Faulkner Award, is virtually unknown today. In a 1985 review, the New York Times said: “His narrative method is to hover over the action, to digress from it, to explore byways and relationships, to speculate on alternative possibilities – … Read More
The passage continues: “That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself.” This book, the autobiography of Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, reminds me of Proust. He describes things in great detail — including his faults and … Read More