fiction

Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’

January 17, 2013 | 29 Comments

Storytelling & spirituality in Virginia Woolf’s classic feminist text. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.—A Room of One’s Own A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Harcourt, 112 pp. I forgot to bring to the beach Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a lamentable oversight with the Atlantic surf hissing and breaking outside. Sometimes I feel almost frightened by …

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Swamped by ‘Infinite Jest’

January 11, 2013 | 13 Comments

On failing to finish David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece novel.   Carry nothing even remotely vegetabalish if in the path of a feral herd. —Infinite Jest To paraphrase Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, “It’s a terrible thing to quit a book. To take from it less than it has to give.” I don’t believe that about books—we should quit any one that’s not working for us and start another—but David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest is a special case. And I’ve …

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Noted: Gutkind on nonfiction’s truth

December 30, 2012 | 8 Comments

Does the nature of narrative complicate his 1-2-3 recipe? The subject is there only by the grace of the author’s language. —Joyce Carol Oates Immersion journalist and nonfiction theorist Lee Gutkind distills his practices in an essay, “Three R’s of Narrative Nonfiction,” in the New York Times’s popular Draft column that deals with writing. Responsible narrative nonfiction writers follow a similar procedure to assure accuracy while recreating events they didn’t see and others’ mental states, asserts Gutkind. Here’s the nut …

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Those best books lists . . .

December 11, 2012 | 8 Comments

Strayed’s Wild my top memoir; Ford’s Canada my top novel. I’m on track to have read some sixty-seven books in 2012. I know that because for the first time I kept a reading log, which is heavily weighted toward memoir: thirty-plus read, including re-readings. Maybe that’s because memoir’s been my own writing project, though by now I’m a true fan of the genre. The rest are a smattering of history, theory, short stories and novels. There were standouts and duds …

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What we write about tells us who we are…

December 1, 2012 | 4 Comments

The reblogged post above is by Cristian Mihai, a young Romanian fiction writer, a self-publisher with a big following, and a talented blogger with many fans. After my last post, which mused about differences between the practice of fiction and nonfiction, I was struck by Chuck Palahniuk’s quote regarding the use of self in fiction—it applies as well to nonfiction. Especially to personal and dramatized nonfiction, to memoir essays and books. Writing about the broken or pained self without the …

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Truth and beauty redux

November 28, 2012 | 6 Comments

Nonfiction faces challenges in writing from another’s point of view; but do the genre’s constraints limit its claims to art? A version of the post below first appeared January 20, 2009. I was thinking about it because I re-read Tim O’Brien’s revered short story “The Things They Carried,” and read for the first time Ron Hansen’s immortal short story “Wickedness,” both of them very essayistic. And O’Brien’s, anyway, is often claimed by practitioners of creative nonfiction because it seems autobiographical. …

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Junot Díaz: Voice of a genius

November 14, 2012 | 9 Comments

The novelist holds up a mirror to society through narrative. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz Riverhead Books, 213 pp., $26.95. Guest Review by Lanie Tankard “I stand in for the absolute silence in our communities.”—Junot Díaz Will Junot Díaz add the National Book Award to his shelf of literary prizes? He’s one of five fiction finalists for the honor to be announced on November 14. Díaz has already scooped up so many awards, however, that he’s a …

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