Throughout the fiction reading population, that sliver of humanity that still desperately clings to those primitive print-filled anachronisms called books, word of a new novel from Lorrie Moore sweeps like wildfire. Moore inspires a fanatical following. She deserves it, based on a handful of brilliant short stories collected in Self-Help, Like Life, and Birds of America, and a couple novels, Anagrams, and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital.
Finally, after eleven years, here comes A Gate at the Stairs.
"Ms. Moore has written her most powerful book yet," says the New York Times, "a book that gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief." (Read the rest of the NYT book review by Michiko Kakutani here.)
"Her last book," Jonathan Lethem reminds us, "the 1998 story collection 'Birds of America,' included the unforgettable baby-with-cancer story 'People Like That Are the Only People Here,' a breathtakingly dark overture to a decade’s silence — as if the Beatles had exited on 'A Day in the Life.'" Read the rest of Lethem's essay on Moore here.
Read an interview with Lorrie Moore in The Believer.
HOW TO BECOME A WRITER
by Lorrie Moore
First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age -- say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is touch and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll lookbriefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a donut. She'll say: "How about emptying the dishwasher?" Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Accidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters.
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness In The West, is a brutal novel that traces the journeys of a band of marauding scalp-hunters in the Old West who viciously murder Indians and Mexicans, armed and unarmed alike. The book is a dark masterpiece and a meditation on violence and the American psyche that owes much to Melville and Faulkner, as well as the King James Bible and Paradise Lost. McCarthy has written a number of excellent books, including the Border trilogy (which includes the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses), and his most recent novel The Road is being made into a film, but he is probably best known to the general public as the writer of the book that became the Coen Brothers' film No Country for Old Men, which won four Oscars including Best Picture of the Year (2007).
Wheezing literary eminence Harold Bloom (pictured here guarding the canon) hailed Blood Meridian as one of the best books of the last century and placed it firmly in the Western canon, as well as his own "canon of the American Sublime." Bloom spoke recently to AV Club:
"I went straight through it and was exhilarated. I said, 'My God! This reminds me of Thomas Pynchon at his best, or Nathanael West.' It was the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In fact, I taught it for several years...I don’t think McCarthy will ever match it, but still… He has attained genius with that book."
Professor Amy Hungerford teaches The American Novel Since 1945 at Yale, and she devoted two lectures in the course to Blood Meridian. This is the first lecture, and the second can be found here:
In a rare interview, the reclusive McCarthy speaks with Oprah. Perhaps not as insightful an interviewer as one would hope, her teatime chat at the Santa Fe Institute will give you some idea of McCarthy the man--and surprisingly enough he does not carry a six-shooter or wear a scapular of dried human ears. In fact, he seems like a perfectly pleasant gentleman--but looks can deceive.
The latest film based on McCarthy's work, The Road, is a harrowing post-apocalyptic story about a father and son (played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) traveling through a burnt out wasteland in search of safety while evading predators. The film will be released October 16th.
Read a great on-set story from the New York Times here.
Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry by John Kramer, Donald Brittain (1976, approx. 99 minutes)
This feature-length Oscar-nominated documentary focuses on Malcolm Lowry, author of one of the major novels of the 20th century, "Under the Volcano." Shot on location in four countries, this fascinating film combines photographs, readings by Richard Burton from the novel, and interviews with the people who loved and hated the man who won the battle with the novel but lost the fight with demons and drink.
And what he wanted then, ah then (he had turned right without looking at the sign and was following the path along the wire fence), what he wanted then, he thought, casting one yearning glance at the plains - and at this moment he could have sworn that a figure, the details of whose dress he did not have time to make out before it departed, but apparently in some kind of mourning, had been standing, head bowed in deepest anguish, near the centre of the public garden - what you want then, Geoffrey Firmin, if only as an anecdote against such routine hallucinations, is, why it is, nothing less than to drink; to drink, indeed, all day, just as the clouds once more bid you, and yet not quite; again it is more subtle than this; you do not wish merely to drink, but to drink in a particular place in a particular town.
Do you ever wonder why some stories capture you while others meander and lose steam, or lumber predictably toward a ho-hum ending? Here's an interesting lecture from John Truby, author of "The Anatomy of a Story," that may answer these questions. You may agree or disagree, and his model may seem somewhat formulaic or mechanistic, but he has some valuable insights into story structure. (This clip contains Part 1, "Premise," and Part 2, "Seven Steps." You can find the rest of the lecture at Google Video)
Here is an excerpt from Truby's book, The Anatomy of Story:
Yes, yes, it's June 16th Bloomsday and we raise a pint to James Augustine Aloysius Joyce that difficult language-drunken Irishman and author of many a puzzling tome and riddle including one he stole lock, stock and barrel from a blind Greek named Homer called Ulysses which all takes place in one single day, I kid you not, and that day is today, June 16th, and pinch-nosed readers with spectacles emerge nearly blind from every nook and cranny worldwide to celebrate and every crook and nanny clatters pots and pans and hoists jams jars for he's a jolly good fellow and so say all of us.
Denis Johnson wrote the best book I read last year, Tree of Smoke. Evidently, I wasn't the only one who thought so since it snagged him the National Book Award. He's coming out with a noirish pulp thriller that was serialized in Playboy, Nobody Move. (I just read an advance proof, and it was brisk hardboiled fun). Johnson first caught the public eye with a brilliant collection of stories, Jesus' Son, back in 1992. Dialog, structure, heart--this guy has the chops. He also knows more Dylan lyrics than anyone I've ever played guitars with...but that's just shameless name-dropping, so I'll shut up.
Tree of Smoke, his last book, the big book, has an historical sweep of America in the 1960s, concentrating specifically on US foreign policy in the hearts and minds of a handful of soldiers, drifters, outlanders, true believers. Oh oh, you say, another Vietnam novel? Why do we need another Vietnam book after Robert Stone and Tim O'Brien, after the reportage of Michael Herr? To paraphrase Celine, don't judge it too quickly. The novel rings like a tuning fork with current foreign affairs. It's about then, sure, but it's about now.
It's a big story--an interweaving of several stories, actually--with very real characters and difficult moral questions. After exhibiting his knack for shorter work, this comes as a surprise since most writers are fortunate to master one form, and here Johnson expands his universe to convincingly cover a huge cast of disparate characters across several continents. Don't get me wrong. This is not some simple macho war story or any of that gung ho horseshit, but a masterful display of what we expect from literary fiction at its best. Johnson delivers. Don't believe me. Read the review in the New York Times, here.
Or better yet, read the book.
here's an excerpt:
He kept his vision on the spot where he'd seen it among the branches of a rubber tree, putting his hand out for the rifle without altering the direction of his gaze. It moved again. Now he saw that it was some sort of monkey, not much bigger than a Chihuahua dog. Not precisely a wild boar, but it presented itself as something to be looked at, clinging by its left hand and both feet to the tree's trunk and digging at the thin rind with an air of tiny, exasperated haste. Seaman Houston took the monkey's meager back under the rifle's sight. He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey's head into the sight. Without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger.
The monkey flattened itself out against the tree, spreading its arms and legs enthusiastically, and then, reaching around with both hands as if trying to scratch its back, it tumbled down to the ground. Seaman Houston was terrified to witness its convulsions there. It hoisted itself, pushing off the ground with one arm, and sat back against the tree trunk with its legs spread out before it, like somebody resting from a difficult job of labor.
Seaman Houston took himself a few steps nearer, and, from the distance of only a few yards, he saw that the monkey's fur was very shiny and held a henna tint in the shadows and a blond tint in the light, as the leaves moved above it. It looked from side to side, its breath coming in great rapid gulps, its belly expanding tremendously with every breath like a balloon. The shot had been low, exiting from the abdomen.
Seaman Houston felt his own stomach tear itself in two. "Jesus Christ!" he shouted at the monkey, as if it might do something about its embarrassing and hateful condition. He thought his head would explode, if the forenoon kept burning into the jungle all around him and the gulls kept screaming and the monkey kept regarding its surroundings carefully, moving its head and black eyes from side to side like someone following the progress of some kind of conversation, some kind of debate, some kind of struggle that the jungle—the morning—the moment—was having with itself. Seaman Houston walked over to the monkey and laid the rifle down beside it and lifted the animal up in his two hands, holding its buttocks in one and cradling its head with the other. With fascination, then with revulsion, he realized that the monkey was crying. Its breath came out in sobs, and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked. It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing. "Hey," Houston said, but the monkey didn't seem to hear.
As he held the animal in his hands, its heart stopped beating. He gave it a shake, but he knew it was useless. He felt as if everything was all his fault, and with no one around to know about it, he let himself cry like a child. He was eighteen years old.
Writing ain't easy. Even after satisfying the demands of a cruel and playful Muse (writing every day, rewriting, wrestling with plot, structure, voice, and reading...yes, reading) it's still a bitch. Join a writing group, attend a workshop, get an MFA, and you still struggle. It's the nature of the beagle. Oh, you can write pages of breezy crap but when you really attempt to challenge yourself and create something new you find the task tantamount to squeezing blood from a block of aged Tillamook cheddar.
That's why a phalanx of writing gurus have sprung up like the skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts. They bark orders, or whisper sweet nothings in your ear. They set up literary boot camp and run you through the drills. They have books and programs and software to make things easy. Well, easier. Critics say they reduce literature to mere craft and ratchet down inspiration to formula. What's the dang deal?
Probably the most famous is Robert McKee. He's a cranky drill instructor who wrote the bible of craft, "Story." Here is an interview with Robert McKee:
Here's McKee in action:
Writing gurus aside, you can't do better than going back and rereading John Gardner's "On Becoming a Novelist," or "The Art of Fiction." Read that, and Burroway's "Imaginative Writing," or James Wood's "How Fiction Works," or John Defresne's "The Lie that Told the Truth," or maybe Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer." Read voraciously, and write every day, and then...it will still be hard.
The fellow cleared his throat. Donne, of course, called it lethargie, and for a time it seems conjoined somewhat with melancholy, saturninia, otiositas, tristitia; that is, to be confused with sloth and torpor and lassitude and eremia and vexation and distemper and attributed to spleen—for example, see Winchilsea’s “black jaundice,” or, of course, Burton.
A new novel by David Foster Wallace is scheduled for release next year.
"The Pale King," excerpted in The New Yorker magazine edition coming out today, is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Illinois in the 1980s. (link below)
The novel is long and unfinished, but DFW fans should snatch it up. According to Wallace's publisher, Little, Brown and Company, the novel runs "several hundred thousand words and will include notes, outlines, and other material."
Wallace, best known for the novel "Infinite Jest," was a longtime suffer from depression and committed suicide last fall. He was 46, and had been working on "The Pale King" for several years. According to a New Yorker piece, he was struggling to top "Infinite Jest" until his death.
Read "The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass Infinite Jest," here.
Richard Price writes amazing novels and screenplays, and nobody can match his ear for the rhythms of life in the city. He grew up in a housing project in the Bronx, and his work booms with the streets. His first novel, The Wanderers (1974) was a slim, breezy read (it made an okay film) but his books got bigger and better, and more ambitious in scope, producing such classics as Clockers (1992), Freedomland (1998), and finally what may be his masterpiece, Lush Life (2008). In between books, Price writes screenplays--his script for Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986) was nominated for an Academy Award. Most recently he wrote for the brilliant HBO series, The Wire.
Omar on the HBO series The Wire
To say Price is just a crime novelist is like saying Saul Bellow is just some guy who writes about Chicago. Price transcends any genre pigeonhole. His beat may be inner city life and the rough characters who live it, but he captures that life in all its moral complexity. All that, and a perfect ear. Characters speak naturally, realistically, exchanging opinions, shooting the bull, shouting insults, revealing themselves. Nobody writes dialog like Price.
True dat.
Lush Life is set in the rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side, where class and color collide, and the pampered meet the desperate. Price handles the American castes like a modern day Dickens. Price may be the best writer you read all year.
"All Over the Map" -- Price joins panel discussion with three other novelists.
Richard Price gives a reading and answers questions
Everyday I write the book. Some days are better than others. It's been said that Balzac could knock off a novel by noon. I assume that was only the first draft. Even so, it was quite an accomplishment. Some write novels in their sleep, with one hand tied behind their back, or on the head of a pin. It takes me much longer than those circus freaks. I sweat over every word, and then rewrite what I've written. Maybe I'm a perfectionist. I can dash off emails or blog posts as if they were Post-it Notes, which I can dash off like Balzac, but send me anywhere near "important" writing and I have to use an axe to break through the ice. Sometimes it's easier and the story carries me along, but I think people who brag that "the story wrote itself" are either bald-faced liars or aren't writing deep enough, and the last thing the world needs is more formulaic crap.
What's going on in my brain? One person who might know is neurologist Alice W. Flaherty, the author of Midnight Disease: the Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain.What a wonderful, mind-boggling read. (She's on a panel discussion linked below.)
Another person who might have a clue about writing--and the creative process-- is author Francine Prose, who has written a number of novels and a book on writing, Reading Like a Writer.
Writer David Foster Wallace suffered from depression and eventually took his own life, but was extremely creative, prolific, and successful. Was his pathology somehow linked to his prodigious creative output, or was that purely circumstantial? In this interview with Le Conversazioni in 2006 he seems like a mollusk without a shell. Here he discusses failure:
The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination is devoted to exploring creativity and the imaginative process. Not long ago, they hosted Hypergraphia and Hypographia, a roundtable discussion featuring Jonathan Lethem, Alice W. Flaherty, Pedro Reyes, Francis Levy, Alan Jacobs, and Lois Oppenheim. The panel examined the neurological and psychodynamic basis for writer's block and the opposite affliction, hypergraphia, which compels the artist to write, write, write uncontrollably.
It's a fascinating discussion, and to watch it click HERE and select video.
David Foster Wallace (1) was found dead (2) in Los Angeles, California (3) in an apparent suicide. (4). A shining light of his generation, often linked to Pynchon and DeLillo for his pyrotechnics and post-post-modern sensibility, he was best known for Infinite Jest (5) and a mock-academic style that often included numerous footnotes and endnotes.(6)
[Wallace] "used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose; his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad 'deep and meaningless' facets of contemporary life." (7)
"Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone." (8)
LA Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday. "What was a party is now a wake," David Ulin said as the news of Wallace's death circulated. "People were speechless and just blown away."(9)
1) American novelist, essayist, and short story writer (February 21, 1962-September 12, 2008) 2) He was discovered by his wife 3) Actually, he was found at his home Claremont, California, according to Jackie Morales of the Claremont Police. Morales is a records clerk and received the call from Wallace's wife at 9:30 PM, Friday evening 4) Wallace apparently hanged himself 5) published in 1996, Infinite Jest is a sprawling, non-linear, post-modern novel loosely based on Wallace's own youth as a talented tennis player 6) Infinite Jest includes over 400 endnotes, some a dozen pages long 7) Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, September 14th, 2008 8) Frank Bruni, n a 1996 profile in the New York Times Magazine 9) Los Angeles Times, September 14th, 2008
Tin House ended last night with bleary-eyed writers smoking, drinking, dancing, nursing wounds, swapping email addresses, and planning cab rides to the airport. A DJ played soul music. One tired dancer swayed just fast enough to keep her hula hoop aloft, giving the impression of some sad Saturn gradually surrendering to entropy. After an intense week of readings, workshops, lectures, Q and A sessions, networking, interviews with agents, singalongs, meal tickets, and lack of sleep, the hula hoop dance was a metaphor. It mirrored our exhaustion and refusal to surrender. We would leave without a magic bullet, without an amulet, armed only with the knowledge that others like us were scattered across this weatherbeaten planet practicing the exacting art of storytelling. By midnight it was vague and blurry--something about truth and memory--but even when I said my goodbyes and staggered to my car fishing for my keys I could have told you one thing: there was work to do. Not right then, thank God. But soon, and forever. Fuckin' A!
Colson Whitehead guided our workshop of twelve writers. He is bright, clever, shy, direct, a good writer and teacher. Here he is, sans dreadlocks, on the second half of this Charlie Rose show. Read his opinion piece in the New York Times here.
I'm out of town, and today I start my first day of Tin House Summer Writing Workshop, an amazing weeklong intensive of workshops, readings, seminars and panel discussions. The writers attending are quite impressive. Today, I meet some of my fellow students as well as writers, agents, editors, and the always present demons of doubt. I was admitted on the basis of my manuscript, and so were my fellow attendees, and I've read their stories in preparation, and they are good. My group leader is Colson Whitehead, the author of "The Intuitionist," "John Henry Days," and "Apex Hides the Hurt." I'll keep you posted on my progress this week.
In the meantime, Jacques Derrida, the famous French deconstructionist, will discuss the "Fear of Writing."
You're mainlining mass culture, little junkie, with all that flashy cable TV infotainment entering your veins in a continuous and steady morphine drip. Even if you hate it, you can't help yourself, and your synapses are firing in time to the latest on Lindsay and Angelina and other daft celebutantes who are famous for being famous. You sense there is more to life...but what?
You know America's Most Idle, and it's various permutations, but do you know who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
This guy. A thirty-nine year old Dominican named Junot Diaz. He wrote a slangy Spanglish novel, giving us an outsider's perspective on life from the point of view of a fat uber-nerd named Oscar Wao who's into comic books. Don't worry, you won't have to read it. Reading makes your brain hurt. But you can watch these clips pretty easily. I suggest you do. The book is "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."
Ray Bradbury (b. August 27, 1920) sci-fi writer, wrote such imaginative books as THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, FAHRENHEIT 451 and SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. At 87 Bradbury still writes every day, a lifelong habit he attributes to an incident in 1932 when a carnival entertainer, Mr. Electro touched him with an electrified sword, made his hair stand on end, and shouted, "Live forever!"
Back when I was twelve years old I was madly in love with L. Frank Baum and the Oz books, along with the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and especially the Tarzan books and the John Carter, Warlord of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I began to think about becoming a writer at that time.
Simultaneously I saw Blackstone the Magician on stage and thought, what a wonderful life it would be if I could grow up and become a magician.
In many ways that is exactly what I did. - Ray Bradbury, 2001
Ray Bradbury speaking at the "Writers' Symposium by the Sea."
During the summers after fifth and sixth grade, my family moved to Corvallis where Dad worked on his master's degree at Oregon State. During those golden summers I rode my bike all over that drowsy college town, exploring a different stretch each day, with only a couple guaranteed stops: an old fashioned ice cream parlor and the public library on Monroe. After hours on my three-speed bike, I'd curl up in the library stacks with science fiction by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. Bradbury was a particular favorite, and I spent a good part of those summers trekking through his Martian vistas and dark magical carnivals, traveling in time machines, visiting space stations and distant planets and future worlds where the imagination was outlawed and firemen burned the books. What amazing stuff!
Something I didn't know about Ray Bradbury, that I found in Wikipedia:
"Bradbury was a close friend of Charles Addams and collaborated with him on the creation of the macabre "Family" enjoyed by New Yorker readers for many years and later popularized as The Addams Family." It figures. I'm also a big Addams fan.
I've been working on a novel, and preparing to attend a summer writers' conference in July. A few years ago, I spent a couple weeks in a workshop guided by writers Tim O'Brien and Amy Hempel. They were good teachers, a well as writers. During my stay, Tim line-edited seventy-five pages of my manuscript. He was very supportive, but ruthless about cutting extraneous "stuff" that didn't ring true, or failed to move the story forward. It was a bracing experience. He was the same way about his own work. Before his reading one evening, he showed me his copy of "The Things They Carried," which was already published, and the printed pages were filled with his own handwritten corrections and changes, some major.
Hempel and O'Brien were opposites on the surface, but formed quite a good teaching team. What do these writers have in common? A woman who went to Sarah Lawrence, and a man who went to Vietnam? An obsession with truth. Strange as it seems, these writers of fiction struggled to create truth in their work-- and the way truth plays with imagination, memory, and myth.
O'Brien says there is "story-truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), and "story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth."
If you haven't read any of Amy Hempel's short stories, do so immediately. Her "Collected Stories" came out in 2006, and can be purchased here. An especially good place to start is the frequently anthologized story, "In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried."
If you haven't read Tim O'Brien's work, you should. "Going After Cacciato" (which won the National Book Award in 1979) and "The Things They Carried" are contemporary classics. "Things" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. For more O'Brien and his work, click this link (you will need to sign in to the New York Times) HERE.
Michael Chabon and Oakley Hall chat in the library of UC Berkeley. The video is pretty dark, so think of it as a good radio show.
Michael Chabon wrote "Wonder Boys" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," which won the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is the critically acclaimed "The Yiddish Policemen's Union."
Oakley Hall died last month, on May 12, 2008. Hall wrote "Warlock," a twisted literary western, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1958. Thomas Pynchon once remarked that he and Richard Farina formed a "mini-cult" around this book.
For years, Hall was considered the dean of West Coast fiction. He taught an impressive array of talented writers at UC at Irvine, including Chabon and Richard Ford. Some of his teaching was distilled in "The Art and Craft of Novel Writing," a book Robert Stone says is "simply the best book in print to examine the strategies and necessities involved in the making of a novel."
Oakley Hall, American writer and teacher, 1920-2008
And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovitch an unintelligible, aimless jest. . . . And turning his eyes from the water and looking at the sky, he remembered again how fate in the person of an unknown woman had by chance caressed him, he remembered his summer dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meagre, poverty-stricken, and colourless. . . . -from The Kiss, by Anton Chekhov Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. -from Araby, by James Joyce
He dove in and swam the pool, but when be tried to haul himself up onto the curb he found that the strength in his arms and shoulders had gone, and he paddled to the ladder and climbed out. Looking over his shoulder be saw, in the lighted bathhouse, a young man. Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds—some stubborn autumnal fragrance—on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry. -from The Swimmer, by John Cheever
So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition, that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn't write them down. -from The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges
Great lines from great stories. Great writing. I decided to make a list of my favorite short stories, an impossible task, but a good distraction from an illustration commission that requires more than simple procrastination to avoid. So I made this list. Here, a highly subjective list of my all-time favorite short stories:
The Kiss - by Anton Chekhov Car Crash While Hitchhiking - by Denis Johnson The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - by Alan Sillitoe Axolotl - by Julio Cortazar Babylon Revisited - by F. Scott Fitzgerald The Dead - by James Joyce Cathedral - by Raymond Carver Signs and Symbols - by Vladimir Nabokov Walking Out - by David Quammen People Like That Are the Only People Here - by Lorrie Moore The Blue Hotel - by Stephen Crane Helping - by Robert Stone The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - by James Thurber A Clean, Well Lighted Place - by Ernest Hemingway Rock Springs - by Richard Ford A Good Man is Hard to Find - by Flannery O'Connor Barn Burning - by William Faulkner The Things They Carried - by Tim O'Brien A & P - by John Updike The Schreuderspitze - by Mark Helprin The Swimmer - by John Cheever The Barracks Thief - by Tobias Wolf
And my all-time favorite, The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges.
To read The Aleph, click HERE for the complete text.
Maybe you know Roberto Bolano, but probably not. Even if you pay attention to such things, an experimental author who writes in Spanish might be easy to miss, even when he is lauded worldwide as a big deal. I mean, it's not like he's Brittney Spears or an American Idol, after all -- you know, really important. He's a writer, for godsakes! And he doesn't even have the courtesy to write in English, so how good could he be? For a while he's been traded among the cognoscenti as a secret commodity, a contraband item, something to turn someone on to, an antidote to jaded tastes. Now he's finally getting his well-deserved due in the English-speaking world after important critical essays in the New York Review of Books ("The Great Bolano," July 19, 07) and the New York Times ("The Visceral Realist," April 15th, 07). Bolano died on 2003, at the age of fifty. A Chilean novelist and poet, he traveled Latin America on his own version of "The Motorcycle Diaries," the trip that radicalized Che Guevara, and befriended revolutionary poet, Roque Dalton, in El Salvador. Bolano returned to help the elected socialist Allende in his native Chile, but in 1973, in a US-orchestrated coup, the dictator Pinochet took power, and Bolano was jailed. He was rescued by a couple classmates who had become prison guards, and escaped the country.
A descendant of brilliant fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, but highly unique, Bolano has written several books now in translation, including the novella "Night in Chile," and "Distant Star." His latest novel to be translated into English is "The Savage Detectives." It tells the tale of two desperately poor poet travelers, members of the secret philosophy movement "The Visceral Realists." Philosophical, whimsical yet political, Bolano is a new animal, a rara avis in letters, something special to seek out if you venture beyond the Comfort Zone. There is talk of another book, the massive "2666" published in 2004 (in Spanish), a novel that is divided in five "parts," four and a half of which were finished before Bolaño's death. Centered around the unsolved (and ongoing) serial killings in Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican border, the book features a wide cast of characters in it's 1100 pages, including the secretive, Pynchon-like German writer Archimboldi. That should be interesting.
