“You have a hard time imagining how the things you’ve experienced or discovered, which seem abjectly personal, could be of use to another writer. You’re aware that you can follow every single rule in the book, and still write a crappy story.” The Preservationist author Justin Kramon grapples with the idea of teaching writing to college students.
“You’re a fiction writing professor.”
The Lost Books
Over at NPR, Parul Sehgal recommends five books “that have been restored to us, that have been reissued, reimagined or — in one instance — presumed lost and discovered for the first time.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Weigel; Galchen: Phillips; Lepore; Dixon; Hale
Out this week: Labor of Love by Moira Weigel; Little Labors by Rivka Galchen; Unforbidden Pleasures by Adam Phillips; Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore; Letters to Kevin by Stephen Dixon; and The Fat Artist and Other Stories by Benjamin Hale. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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Where Is My Mind?
Do our brains determine how we write? Joyce Dyer explores the possibility that genre is influenced by how our brains are wired but wonders if that limits us. "The page may be forcing compromises that the brain, in such close relationship with the mind, must rightly refuse," she writes.
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The Truth Is Here
Here's a piece of news you likely didn't see coming: David Duchovny has published a novel. Titled Holy Cow, it deals, in the words of interviewer Taffy Brodesser-Akner, with "a traumatized cow, a sassy turkey and a pig converting to Judaism." She talks with the X-Files star in this week's Times Magazine.
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