“Setting is often the last piece of the jigsaw. I start somewhere else—with a kind of a premise, a set of relationships, a theme—and I often have a long period when I can’t figure out where the story should be put down. I find myself going location hunting. Not just for a time and place, but also for a genre, if you like.” Kazuo Ishiguro on the Hazlitt podcast. For more things Ishiguro, here is our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant.
For the Sake of Cohesion
Much Ado about Queneau
To commemorate publication of the 65th anniversary edition of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, New Directions has asked ten contemporary writers to “create new exercises in homage to Queneau.” Over at The Rumpus, you can check out Jonathan Lethem’s “Cyberpunk” exercise, as well as one of Queneau’s twenty eight “never before translated” exercises making its English debut in the new edition. Bonus: read our own Mark O’Connell on the “radical claims about the relationship between form and content” in Queneau’s writing.
Song of Herself
Does she contradict herself? Very well, then she contradicts herself, she is large, she contains multitudes! Is Sarah Palin the Walt Whitman of Wasilla?
A Mom can be destroyed but not defeated.
It's time for some afternoon trivia; Hemingway or my mother's email?
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your brain is going soft with all that comedy
Vito Corleone, comedian.
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Ben Greenman Interviewed
Ben Greenman, a favorite around here, interviewed at Failbetter.