Is “the two-person collaboration… the essential creative act”? Joshua Wolf Shenk thinks so, and he’s written a book defending his position, aptly titled The Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney are his primary examples and the root of his argument, famous author duos are also referenced – C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, for one. Shenk even “works to transform even famously lonely figures — Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr. — into one side of a duet.” Consider us skeptical but intrigued.
The Dynamism of Duos
Shifting from Criticism to Fiction with Lauren Oyler
Lauren Oyler discusses how writing literary criticism helped her define the intentional, dynamic style she wanted in her own fiction.
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It’s Not You, It’s Me
What to do when you and your best friend don’t like the same books.
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Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Remembers the Beauty of the World Through Poetry
Melissa Lozada-Oliva discusses her new novel in verse, Dreaming of You, and the role poetry plays in keeping us attuned to the beauty around us.
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Bill Morris on the Road
Our own Bill Morris (the man Michiko Kakutani once compared favorably to John Updike) is hitting the road in support of his novel Motor City Burning, and you can catch him now as he swings through the South before heading to the Midwest. Elsewhere, see what Detroit’s hometown paper learned from Bill about a novel that mines the city’s fractious history.
Muggles Appraising Wizards
Over the past few years, the Movoto Real Estate blog has become the internet’s number one destination for appraising the real estate in the Harry Potter universe. First they estimated the value of Hogwart’s Castle to be around $204 million, and now they’ve turned in an estimate of the Weasley family’s Burrow near Ottery St. Catchpole.
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