Every fiction writer, it’s safe to say, has had the experience of writing something, then asking: “Where the hell did that come from?” Sometimes our next act is to delete it and try again, but on occasion we’re lucky, and…
It’s said of the James brothers that William wrote philosophy like a novelist and Henry wrote novels like a philosopher. Something similar came to mind while reading Cynthia Ozick’s essay, “W. H. Auden at the 92nd Street Y” in her…
The first page of Jenny Erpenbeck’s amazing 2014 novel The End of Days (Aller Tage Abend in German, available in English from New Directions) has to rank among the most agonizingly beautiful—and thematically apt—novel openings ever written: “The Lord gave,…
For me, the big-daddy, litmus-test, most-uncomfortable-question-of-all has always been: do I need to be a writer, or merely want to? The implication being that one’s legitimacy as a writer depends on a yes to first part of the question, a…
It’s true. For years I used it to keep the wind from slamming shut a particularly annoying door. Why this book? Because it was there: the first in a use-every-last-inch row of dusty volumes precariously atilt atop a chock-full bookcase,…
“Our mother performed in starlight.” Thus reads the succinct and succulent first sentence of Swamplandia!, Karen Russell’s 2011 literary blockbuster (Oops! Dead metaphor.) And while it doesn’t, at first blush, contain a metaphor—their mother, Hilola Bigtree, really does perform under…