Recently, we featured five writers’ reminisces about the novels they ultimately shelved. Here a sixth, Elmo Keep, explains what led her to throw away her first novel, quite outside considerations of craft:”I could not resolve the conflict of a story that was not mine.”
The Unwritten Novel
Ulin on King
David Ulin offers a brief consideration of Stephen King. King’s work, Ulin writes, “exposes, with real acuity, a lot about who we are.”
●
●
Odd Jobs
Recommended viewing: The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik talks about his early years in New York writing for the magazine “though they simply weren’t aware of it, or when they were aware of it they were extremely unenthusiastic,” and about all the odd jobs that often make up a writer’s early career, something our own Emily St. James Mandel has written about before.
●
●
A Truly Author-itative Map
Geoff Sawers has designed maps detailing the rich literary landscapes of the United States, England, and Wales.
Swimming Against Conventions
“My goal isn’t soft multiculturalism, but rather to convey a richer and fuller sense of what literature is, what the possibilities are, and to share the voices that often get excluded or silenced when we speak of ‘literature’ and ‘writing.’” Guernica interviews Counternarratives author John Keene.
●
●
Another book, another ghost
Oh, ghostwriter: that poorly-paid name snuck into the “Acknowledgements” section somewhere after agent’s agent and ex-wife’s third cousin. In the middle ground between Michael D’Orso, who spoke to The Millions of job satisfaction as a hired pen, and Sari Botton, whose reminisces are full of horror stories, Andrew Croft, author of 80 books that sold 10M copies under other people’s names, offers a circumspect take in his Guardian profile. “The ghost is advised never to forget that, at the end of the day, he or she ranks somewhere between a valet and a cleaner.”
●
●
Purgatorio
After more than sixty years, Antonio di Benedetto has had his book Zama finally translated into English. The novel, which kicks off in the 1790s, depicts a Spanish administrator named Don Diego de Zama, whose viceroy dispatches him to a town in the scrublands of Paraguay. In the latest New Yorker, Benjamin Kunkel gives his take.
Édouard Levé’s “Monstrous Paradox.”
Millions staffer Mark O’Connell recently took a look at Édouard Levé’s Works. “For the most part, it’s a catalogue of unrealized creativity,” he writes. “Which in the very extensiveness of its cataloging becomes a monstrous paradox of realized creativity.” (Related: O’Connell previously reviewed Levé’s Suicide and Autoportrait for our site.)
●
●