“A novel is a trek home from the desert, sometimes a journey you wish you had never started. Exhausting and humbling, just occasionally wonderful. But a short story can come from a deeper part of the cave.” Jane Gardam on why she prefers writing short stories instead of novels in The Guardian. Pair with Lisa Peet’s essay on Gardam’s organically grown characters.
From a Deeper Part of the Cave
Jean Craighead George Passes Away
Celebrated author Jean Craighead George passed away this week at the age of 92. George published more than 100 books throughout her career, often focusing on the environment and the natural world, most famously in My Side of the Mountain and in her Newbery Medal-winner, Julie of the Wolves.
Patron Half-Elephant
Francine Prose has an idiosyncratic theory that the Hindu god Ganesh is a vital part of her writing process. In a VQR essay, she explains that her portrait of the deity (which she purchased forty years ago at a bazaar in Mumbai) gives her a kind of confidence that goes beyond superstition. As support for this belief, she points out that Ganesh is known in some quarters as “the writer’s god.”
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A Way Out
Recommended Reading: Ursula Lindsey of The Nation takes a trip to Cairo, where many of the Egyptian capital’s artists and writers are being forced to find a way out due to government crackdowns.
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Two Moons, Two Reviews
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Charles Yu describes reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 as not so much reading it, but rather “liv[ing] with it for a while.” I bet our own Kevin Hartnett would agree.
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100 Notable Disappointments
I’m relieved to see I’ve actually read some of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2011. But Rumpus writer Roxane Gay, is pretty disappointed.
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Craft Work
It’s the kind of niggling question that drives a writer mad: is it best to edit a piece after you finish a draft, or is it better to edit while you write? At Electric Lit, Lincoln Michel argues for the latter, on the grounds that it lets writers fix endemic problems before it’s too late. You could also read Lincoln’s 2010 Millions review of the movie Avatar.
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Tournament of Books Zombie Round
After three years of judging, and now “like one of those guys who comes back after graduation and loiters creepily around campus, remembering [his] faded glory days,” our site’s editor-in-chief C. Max Magee finally made it into the booth for the zombie round in The Morning News‘ Tournament of Books. Check out the perils of “the ARC onslaught” and which books were missing from the tournament altogether.