“Could I write a novel about fugues in the form of a fugue?” Margot Singer wonders in The Paris Review, remembering the process of writing her first novel and considering other authors – Joyce, Nabokov, Woolf – who have tried to compose words musically. See also: our own Jacob Lambert on whether to write with background music on.
In a Fugue State
Seduction Through Literature
At The Paris Review Daily, Sarah Fay ruminates on her questionable practice of using literature to seduce men: “Wasn’t I just trying to bribe men hungry for something to read? … How could I deliver book recommendations for an entire marriage?”
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Writing Isn’t For Everyone
“I hate to break it to you but everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them.” For The Outline, literary agent Kate McKean writes about the difference between good stories and good books—and what it takes to write the latter. Pair with: an essay on the books that fight back
Finding Frances
Recommended Reading: Laura Van Prooyen’s poem at The Missouri Review “Location: Frances.” “When I say Frances, I mean a woman. I mean/a place. The dead cling to the land.”
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“To look worse after a haircut”
Come on, admit it: you wish English speakers had a word for “one who shows up to a funeral for the food.”
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No award given
Former Pulitzer Prize juror Laura Miller gives a little insight into how the award works, and posits some possible reasons that the fiction award may have been withheld.
Puffed Up
Don’t blame Amazon or Goodreads for authors writing rave reviews of their own work. Writers have been self-promoting since the 1700s, when it was called “puffery.” As Nicholas Mason writes for Symposium Magazine, “Nearly every British writer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries either participated in or benefitted from ginned-up book reviews.” The list of puffed up authors includes Mary Wollstonecraft, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley.
Misprint: Nabokov
Thanks Robin! Corrected.
Anthony Burgess accomplished that feat.
Beamish!
Well-read you are! I went off AB but 15 years ago I read (and owned) almost every novel (and a few books more) he’d written. Something in Earthly Powers irritated me and the spell was broken… and I must admit I never finished “Napoleon Symphony” (is that the book, or one of the books, you mean?), which was slyly… embarrassingly? dedicated to Kubrick. The problem with AB’s “musical writing” (that is, writing prose to mimic musical effects): you can’t really produce parallel constructions, for the reader, in Lit… there’s no polyphony. You have to make do with Gregorian chants!