The China Daily has an article today criticizing corrupt Chinese officials for signing lucrative book deals in prison. They must not know that some of the world’s most influential works of philosophy and fiction were written in the slammer.
Finishing Novels in Prison
Books Nobody Reads
Maybe nobody read your first, or last, most recent or only book, but writer, take heart: nobody read the work of these 10 great authors either.
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Just a Formality
The novelist Julie Schumacher wrote her latest, Dear Committee Members, entirely in the form of letters of recommendation. The format allowed her to illustrate the travails of a creative writing professor through a medium often ignored in fiction. At The Awl, Jessica Gross and Merve Emre talk about the novel. Pair with: Cathy Day on academia’s novel crisis.
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“All dialogue? Really?”
Seeing as the latest Dave Eggers book consists of all dialogue, it’s a good time to look back on the history of all-dialogue novels. Alexander Kalamaroff, writing for The Rumpus, identifies a few examples, among them The Waves by Virginia Woolf and numerous works in Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme.
Daemon Days
You may have heard (via this site or elsewhere) that Harold Bloom has a new book out. In the Times Sunday Book Review, Cynthia Ozick gives her take, identifying the critic's use of the phrase “without precedent” as key to understanding his theory. You could also read Matt Hanson on Bloom's classic The Anatomy of Influence.
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NYPL Gets Trippy
The New York Public Library has bought psychedelic guru Timothy Leary's papers. The 335 boxes contain journals, videotapes, photographs and thousands of letters from avid trippers, including Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey and, yes, Cary Grant.
Concealing Horrors
“According to David Means and his debut novel, Hystopia, [classic war novels] aren’t simply about confronting the horrors of war, but also about concealing them, hiding them under a layer of rationalizations and wishful thinking that often simplifies their lawless anarchy and finds sense, meaning and purpose where there’s little.” Over at Electric Lit, Simon Chandler reviews David Means’s Hystopia.
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Chekhov, Journalist
Over at the New Yorker, Akhil Sharma argues that "Anton Chekhov’s "Sakhalin Island", his long investigation of prison conditions in Siberia, is the best work of journalism written in the nineteenth century." Pair Sharma's argument, and admiration, with our own Sonya Chung's "I Heart Checkov" essay.
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