Thoughts From The Hopwood Room: Kazuo Ishiguro on “Who’s Your Teacher?”
by Brandon Bye
From the Archives: In honor of Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent Nobel Prize, we revisit the author’s visit to the Hopwood Room in 2015.
From the Archives: In honor of Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent Nobel Prize, we revisit the author’s visit to the Hopwood Room in 2015.
Kazuo Ishiguro visits the Hopwood Room and talks about what qualifies a person to teach writing.
“Along the way, listening to writers at my dinner table speak of their work, their contracts, their advances, their sales, their ratings on Amazon, their competitors, etc, I came to realize how much it takes to carve out a career as an author, to live by the pen. At my present age, none of these concerns are mine.” Elena Delbacno discusses the perks of publishing later in life.
Burning through Adam Haslett’s “Notes to my Biographer”
Stephen Policoff discusses the story origins of his latest novel.
“Writing a novel—for me, at least—is like answering a craigslist ad placed by a group of people seeking a roommate. You meet them; you like them; you move in; but within a short period of time, all of them have moved out, and new people have moved in, and these new people, it turns out, are the ones you’re going to live with for the next few years.”
On Barthelme, that comforting surrealist.
A writer can never have too much (or too little) advice on how to handle rejection. Every rejection, no matter how discrete, invokes the sensation of being punched in the face, and it’s extremely difficult to be magnanimous while that’s going on. So here’s my advice: with a slight shift in perspective, it’s possible to find rejection thrilling. The first step is learning how to take a punch. (Having been raised in a boxing family, I acquired this knowledge early in life.) The second step is learning how to enjoy taking a punch. That’s the hard part. Once my debut […]
I was lucky enough to attend on behalf of FWR, and the evening was pretty magical—the-Oscars-meets-Inside-the-Actors-Studio of short-story collections.
Hey, Park Rangers. Echoing the bold everlasting words of narration in Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love, “What a Midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on his sleeve, in plain sight,” I wanted to share some stories I loved from last year. There’s quite a bit of corny, unapologetic and Hallmark-y content in mid-February, and it can make any toiled romance feel heightened for unnecessary reasons. I know you’re smart enough to not place all your chips in the same stack. Of course I’m getting at sleeping around. It can’t be just […]
