What would happen if you anonymously attended a book club about your own novel? Kevin Baker discovered the embarrassing consequences when a meeting on his novel Dreamland turned negative.
Book Club Blunder
Thees and Thous
Recommended reading: a new, previously undiscovered story and accompanying poem by Charlotte Brontë. The story is rife with flogging and embezzlement–all the good stuff! Here’s a bonus piece on how Charlotte is at least partly responsible for the success of the Bronte sisters as a whole.
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Falling in Love with Language
“When I heard Afro-Brazilian people speak Portuguese, first in films like City of God and Bus 174, and then live and direct in Bahia, I fell hard for the ease, lyricism, and lilt in their voices which reminded me of the Anglophone Caribbean family and community I grew up in.” Over at Words Without Borders, Naomi Jackson reflects on blackness in Brazil.
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10 Rules for Writers by Janet Fitch
“Write the sentence, not just the story” is the first of ten rules for writers from Janet Fitch.
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“manuals for a thinking person”
Jed Perl on Susan Sontag’s journals: “The fascination of Sontag’s prose—and its sadness—is in the extent to which she is describing herself as a person who can never really get beyond a schematic kind of thinking and feeling.”
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Going In
In 2012, the Portuguese writer José Luís Peixoto, on the occasion of Kim Il-Sung’s 100th birthday, went to North Korea for a fifteen-day trip. The experience led him to write a travel memoir, Inside the Secret, which you can read in serialized form online at Ninth Letter magazine. You could also read Pulitzer laureate Adam Johnson’s new Granta essay about the country.
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Rebecca Hunt’s Mr. Chartwell
At The Washington Times, my review of Rebecca Hunt‘s Mr. Chartwell, a shaggy dog novel about Winston Churchill‘s “black dog” (depression).
Only once has an author been present at the book group I attend. She did not remain anonymous, and that pretty much destroyed the discussion. All the readers seemed to want to talk about was her “fame” and her “deals” and a little about her writing process. No discussion of the book at all.