On New Year’s morning this year, I was sitting at a kitchen table in Cleveland, Ohio. I grew up in Cleveland and love it, but (like most people) in the way you love your old rusty car with the duct-taped mirror and muffler tied up with a string, or your dingy old house with [...]
A Lithuanian bookstore has created a gorgeous campaign called “Become Someone Else” (”Pabū kuo nors kitu”) showing the transformative power of books. The Love Agency, the advertising firm that created the campaign, has all of the images up online. (Via GalleyCat.)
And there’s evidence that books have literal (ha ha) transformative powers as well. [...]
These notes were originally written as a preface to my forthcoming novel, My American Unhappiness. It has been deleted from the final manuscript. The pages appear here in an exclusive essay for Fiction Writers Review. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
After its publication in 2000, the first edition of Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers became one of my students’ favorite writing books, and over time it became my go-to gift to graduating seniors with whom I’d formed a special bond, and whose persistence I hoped to bolster in those daunting years ahead. I even kept a small stash of copies in my office. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to this second edition, published in October 2010.
GalleyCat reported a few weeks back that a piece in Health magazine listed writers on a list of 10 careers with high rates of depression. The original Health list says, of artists, entertainers and writers:
These jobs can bring irregular paychecks, uncertain hours, and isolation. Creative people may also have higher rates of mood disorders; about [...]
ubways are not known for being bright and cheerful—but Moscow’s new Dostoevsky-themed station takes subway gloom to a new level. The Dostoevskaya Station opened in June in northern Moscow as a tribute to the famed Russian author and features murals based on his works. Here’s one from Crime and Punishment:
But some worry that [...]
aybe it’s summer—too sunny out to work inside!—or maybe it’s just the 80º+ weather in Boston, but I’ve been feeling a little… tired. Just in time, Paperback Writer has a post on how to combat fatigue—physical, mental, and, most importantly for writers, creative:
Creating on demand, always being on, always being told we’re not good [...]
Here’s a great blog post from FWR favorite Aryn Kyle, on writing “happy literature”:
“You should write something happy,” people tell me, and I don’t understand. Happy like Anna Karenina? Happy like The Grapes of Wrath? Happy like Lolita or Catch-22 or Revolutionary Road? Happy like Hamlet?
What, I’d like to ask [...]
We’ve discussed the links between depression and creativity on this blog before—from a report that some schools on Nantucket were banning “depressing” literature in response to high rates of teen suicides to Anne’s reflections on “When Writers Stop Drinking (or Start Taking Meds, or Start Reading Peter Kramer).” Jonah Lehrer’s recent essay in The [...]
Twice recently, while riding the train, I’ve noticed someone reading David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion, and both times I’ve found myself wondering if– hoping, really–the someone was reading a particular story from that book: “Good Old Neon.”
“Good Old Neon” offers in heartbreaking detail a first-person account of the psychological suffering that leads the apparent narrator, Neal, to suicide. The story begins, “My whole life I’ve been a fraud,” and goes on to unpack the causes and consequences of that statement.
