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: Travis Holland talks with fiction master Tobias Wolff about the pleasures and anxieties of influence, the changing societal role of writer-celebrities, and the reasons Wolff has “always been attracted to the incisiveness, velocity, exactitude, precision of the short story.”
From the Archives: “Trusting the mind and imagination to work in concert as we explore the author/character vortex is no grave sin—provided that we let both mind and imagination do their jobs in peace…”
Back in the fall of 2012, Sebastian Matthews hosted Russell Banks as Visiting Writer for Warren Wilson College’s Harwood-Cole Lecture Series. Knowing he’d be in town for a few days, Matthews arranged to interview Banks, who is a long-time family friend, on Jeff Davis’ radio show Word Play. What follows is Part II of their conversation.
Back in the fall of 2012, Sebastian Matthews hosted Russell Banks as Visiting Writer for Warren Wilson College’s Harwood-Cole Lecture Series. Knowing he’d be in town for a few days, Matthews arranged to interview Banks, who is a long-time family friend, on Jeff Davis’ radio show Word Play. What follows is Part I of their conversation.
“The real estate in North London Drabble-land has appreciated and her cast of bohemian academics has aged over the fifty years since her first novel, A Summer Bird Cage (1963),” Ellen Prentiss Campbell reports, reviewing Dame Margaret Drabble’s newest novel, The Pure Gold Baby, “but she’s back, in fine form.”
“Nostalgia, of course, is the most powerful form of lust: portable as your memories, infinitely rechargeable, and impossible to slake.” Dan Keane reviews James Salter’s new novel, All That Is.
Christopher Hitchens died on December 15th of 2011. In honor of the year anniversary of Hitchens’s passing, Nick Papandreou remembers his long-time friend and fellow writer.
Richard Ford returns to Montana and heads north to Canada. His seventh novel explores life’s borders.
