Taking cues from everyone from Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison to Roland Barthes and Carmen Maria Machado, Ayşe Papatya Bucak questions a key principle of conventional craft wisdom.
“Wang’s understated wit and distinctive tone is undeniable, conjuring up connections to Kafka’s logic-riddled restraint, Camus’s detachment, and Lu Xun’s dark humor.”
From the Archives: Unlike the memoirist, who promises to tell the truth, the fiction writer says, “I am going to tell you a lie, but at the end you will feel it is true.” He or she is a kind of magician who makes sure you know the flames are only an illusion before letting you burn your fingers.
From the Archives: as the annual observance of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) approaches this evening, we return to a 2011 essay by Erika Dreifus on the literary kinship among fictional works from an emerging cohort of “3G” (third-generation) Jewish writers: Julie Orringer, Alison Pick, and Natasha Solomons.
Entering a piece of writing in a collaborative way is at the heart of what Fowles called the “I-thou” theory: no matter how many times a book is read, it is fundamentally a relationship—an encounter—between just two people.
From the Archives: “If I came into writing feeling largely without history or place, writing became a means of discovering both; it also became, as it did for George Willard, a means of discovering a way out, the road ahead. Sherwood Anderson gave me a map.”
From the Archives: What does our reading have to do with our writing, exactly? Charlotte Boulay departs from traditional talk about fiction, reflects on her own reading list, and finds comfort and enthusiasm in reading Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell’s letters to each other, in which they discuss everything they read—and the fact that they read all the time.
From the Archives: Why do we love Sherlock Holmes? The famed detective nearly sent his creator off the deep end, and has been the object of countless films, odes, debates, letters, and pilgrimages over the past century.
From the Archives: “Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Welcome Home alongside a new collection of Lucia Berlin’s short stories, Evening in Paradise, on the same day as the midterm elections last week. A knowing wink from the publisher to the politics that these books contain? Perhaps.”
From the Archives: “Clarity can be reached via winding paths, and the reading experience may be all the richer for the wandering”: Christina Ward-Niven wraps up her essay on defamiliarization with a discussion of Gina Berriault’s surprising language.
From the Archives: “The unexpected can actually move the reader from an automated kind of knowledge to a more complex kind of knowledge”: Christina Ward-Niven on point of view and characterization in Eudora Welty.
From the Archives: “By allowing strangeness into our familiar landscapes, we can surprise the reader into pausing, paying attention, and possibly recognizing some kind of familiar human truth in a new, illuminating way”: Christina Ward-Niven on odd narrative events in Chekhov.
