“It just goes to show you: it’s not just luck you need to have a successful literary career. It’s luck, piled on luck, piled on luck again, and around the corner, you need another sprinkling of it” says Michelle Dean, after investigating Stephen King’s rise in response partly to Dwight Allen’s “Snob Notes” on the author. Colin Dickey and Sarah Langan have both previously weighed on on Allen’s essay and King’s particular strengths.
King’s Critics
Two Davids and The Bone Clocks
Recommended listening: David Naimon interviews David Mitchell about “time, maps, cats,” and The Bone Clocks (which we reviewed here) for Between the Covers.
●
●
“The dead don’t care about much”
Philip Connors‘ essay about his brother, published in Lapham’s Quarterly, is truly heartbreaking.
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
“We were both crying when I left”
Millions staffer Michael Bourne has new fiction in the latest issue of The Cortland Review, and you can check out his story “San Francisco, Summer 1990” on their website.
●
●
Serial
“What the novel needs again is tension. And the best source for that tension is serialization.” An argument for bringing back the serialized novel in the spirit of Dickens, Thackeray and Arthur Conan Doyle from The Washington Post.
Addendum: Though I hadn’t seen it by the time I wrote this post, Alan Jacobs also has a pointed defense of Stephen King (in response to Allen’s snobbery) over at The Atlantic.