Sometimes, a writer needs to live in the setting of his or her fiction, as was the case with William Faulkner, who famously took a train from Hollywood to Mississippi solely to break through his writer’s block. Other times, they need to move away to find the inspiration to write about their home. In The Globe and Mail, Marsha Lederman writes about Emma Hooper, who credits her move to England with helping her write a novel set in her native Saskatchewan.
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On Reading and Personality Disorders
“Six thousand books is a lot of reading, true, but the trash like Hell's Belles and Kid Colt and The Legend of the Lost Arroyo and even Part-Time Harlot, Full-Time Tramp that I devoured during my misspent teens really puff up the numbers. And in any case, it is nowhere near a record. Winston Churchill supposedly read a book every day of his life, even while he was saving Western Civilization from the Nazis. This is quite an accomplishment, because by some accounts Winston Churchill spent all of World War II completely hammered.”
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Please Be Quiet, Please
Recommended Reading: This essay from The Rumpus on total noise and total silence, touching on everyone from Mikhail Zoshchenko to Don DeLillo.
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David Foster Wallace Syllabus
The Harry Ransom Center has scanned and uploaded the syllabus from David Foster Wallace's Fall 1994 section of English 102: Literary Analysis.
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8Bits and Ottoman arts
When an Alumni Mag Covers Bad News
In the wake of the Sandusky scandal, the Penn State alumni mag Penn Stater couldn't ignore the news. The dark, shattered cover is not what you typically see from booster-ish alumni magazines.
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Joke’s On You
"How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg writes some great jokes to use at your next cocktail party.
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