Obsessing Over Women

Write what you know? Pssh, how twentieth-century. More like write what you can Google Map.

Rick Gekoski, previously shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerley prize, talks about what it means to be a good literary loser, at Guardian: “And as soon as the winner is announced and it isn’t you,” Colm Tóibín observed, “the cameraman just walks away, and you are left there at the table trying to look composed, and you want to die.”

“For the first half of a new book, maybe you want your back against the wall. Gunslinger style. Nothing can sneak up on you except your own bad sentences,” Colson Whitehead said. He and four other authors discussed where they like to write in The New York Times. Bonus: See where our writers work.

What’s with the DeLillo pile-on? we asked last week, semi-coherently. Open Letters Monthly provides an astute and meticulous answer in its monthly covering-the-coverage feature, “Peer Review.”