“Who was Bret Easton Ellis describing when he tweeted: ‘The best example of a contemporary male writer lusting for a kind of awful greatness that he simply wasn’t able to achieve’?” The Guardian has a delicious quiz of literary putdowns. And speaking of fighting, let’s talk about books about violence.
Insult to Insult
Looking Over the Shoulders of Giants
Ever want to watch someone write a novel? Nows your chance. Sorta. Silvia Hartmann, UK author of thriller novels, is inviting readers to observe as she types up her next novel in a Google doc.
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The Opposite of #AmWriting
Writing a novel is an all-consuming project, so can you imagine not telling anyone? At The New York Times, Alice Mattison discusses keeping her novels secrets until at least the third draft. “If I talk about the book, I believe — I cannot help believing — my characters will be angry, and will no longer confide in me about their embarrassing, troubled lives.” On another side of the secrecy spectrum, Emma Straub writes about what it’s like to keep a personal secret even as her literary life was booming.
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“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Continuing Tin House’s great “The Art of The Sentence” series, Vishwas Gaitonde dives deep into the opening line from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. (Come on, we all know the one.) Be sure to catch Tin House‘s previous TAoTS series installments as well.
A Mummy Love Story
The great singer-songwriter Josh Ritter is on tour with Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit. In honor of that, here’s puppet master Liam Hurley‘s video for Josh Ritter’s beautiful ballad “The Curse,” a song about a mummy falling in love with the archeologist who discovers him.
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St. Crispin’s Day is Here Again
Today is St. Crispin’s Day, a day immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V when the title character rallied his British “band of brothers” to face their French adversaries. And according to Guy Patrick Cunningham, “there are lots of ways we can celebrate it.”
Well, She Should Know
“Here is a rare recording of Flannery O’Connor reading an early version of her witty and revealing essay, ‘Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction’”
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The Novel vs. The Net
Sven Birkerts, still working through arguments begun in The Gutenberg Elegies, suggests in The American Scholar that “the novel and the Internet are opposites.” (via)