“[A]ny discussion of craft does not take place in a vacuum – that race is part of one’s lived experience and how we see ourselves and are seen does impact how and what we write.” Poet Neil Aiken puts together an absolutely indispensable list of texts – books, essays, lectures and beyond – on the craft of writing by writers of color. See also: our own Edan Lepucki‘s impromptu syllabus of craft readings.
On Craft and Color
An Experimental Review of an Experimental Translation
Matthew Jakubowski’s “experimental review” of Yoko Tawada’s Portrait of a Tongue is unlike anything you’ve read in months, and I promise you that.
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On Bookends
We’ve covered The New York Times Bookends column before. This week, James Parker and Liesl Schillinger discuss why we should read books considered “obscene.” Our own Matt Seidel reveals the rejected questions for the Bookends column.
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The Lost City of Atlantic
“The Boardwalk’s kitsch, the kitsch of Trump’s former properties along the Boardwalk, merely reinforce how retro a mogul the candidate is: a throwback who doesn’t care he’s a throwback, who’s barely aware he is, dressed to impress in a padded Brioni suit and a tie with a scrotum-sized knot.” Novelist Joshua Cohen takes one last trip (maybe?) to the Atlantic City of his youth for n+1. Related: Turns out Cohen’s not the only novelist who’s worked as a casino dealer.
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Blue Nights: Released Next Week
Jacket Copy visits Joan Didion at her apartment in Manhattan to discuss Blue Nights, which moves back and forth between the death of Didion’s 39-year-old daughter, Quintana, six years ago and the author’s reflections on aging. The book is a much anticipated follow-up to 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking, in which Didion wrote about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne.
““[A]ny discussion of craft does not take place in a vacuum – that race is part of one’s lived experience and how we see ourselves and are seen does impact how and what we write.”
Subject matter has nothing to do with craft; issues of craft are identical across the total range of possible author-identities. Craft (its demands; its value judgments, et al) will vary according to language, possibly, and era, possibly, but not, correcting for the other variables, according to gender, age or race. Projecting Race as a factor, where it is supremely irrelevant, is one of the troubling manias of the Era, as though we can, somehow, make up for failures in Politics, Economics or Sociology by concentrating all of the serious conversations about Race that we *aren’t* having, under those three headings, where they will trouble us the least: in (eg) Literary Criticism. On the level of Literary Quality, the age/color/gender of the author is an irrelevant distraction. Authorial biography is already too intrusive, regarding Literary Fiction, and Identity Politics only serve to weaponize the problem.
If a “Writing Consultant” advertized his/her services as a *White* (or Asian or Native American, and so forth) practitioner, my reaction would be to steer clear, to say the least.
What are the best books on Literary Craft? That’s all we need to know. We need to stop with the Positive Segregation, no matter how appropriate to the Era it may feel at the time…