126 posts tagged with literature by chavenet.
Displaying 51 through 100 of 126.
A Field of Ruins
Autofiction has often been derided as both overly concerned with a writer’s individual experience—“navel-gazing”—and inconsiderate to those other than the writer whose lives it depicts. But these criticisms betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what draws writers and readers alike to autofiction. The best—most redemptive—autofiction since Proust included more than 400 characters in his rhizomatic lifework has concerned itself with the ways in which individual lives and identities are connected to the lives and identities of others, and sought to represent this interconnectedness to readers who also sense the terror of being “walled-up” inside their own consciousness. from The Autofiction Writer and the Torturer by Marcus Hijkoop
Ether / Or
The strands of medicine, consciousness expansion, intoxication, addiction, and crime were tightly entangled in fin-de-siècle Paris, where ether and chloroform circulated among bohemian demi-mondaines alongside morphine, opium, cocaine, hashish, and wormwood-infused absinthe ... Literary references to ether abounded, either as a signifier of decadence or as a literary prop to shift a realistic narrative into the landscape of dreams and symbols, where its dissociative qualities became a portal to strange mental states, psychological hauntings, uncanny doublings, and slippages of space and time. from The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Mike Jay
An Epic Tale of Redemption Through Irrigation
The club’s nine-decade history and its forthright, sporty name may convince you that Barbara Worth was a real person—say, a pioneering female golfer, a contemporary of Patty Berg and Babe Zaharias who founded the club after a successful pro career. That is not the case. Barbara Worth exists in the pages of a novel and in a silent film. She was the creation of Harold Bell Wright, the most popular and influential California writer no one today has heard of. Together, author and heroine propelled California’s favorite story about itself: that given will and engineering prowess and water, the state can be whatever it wants to be. from The Most Famous California Novel You’ve Never Heard Of
"It’s Who I Was, And Where I Was, And It Happened To Me.”
More than 50 years ago, the name “Judy Blume” became an enduring pop culture staple for the bravery it took to write books about puberty and sex in a way that no one else was doing. from Judy Blume Doesn’t Miss Writing. She’s Not Afraid of Dying, Either [Variety] [more inside]
An Unproductive Productiveness
It may well be that literature that depends on the adoption of such a godlike attitude is better laid to rest in our age of Ópera Prima. Our era’s preference for the debut novel is also a preference for the autofictional, for a rejection of universality in favor of particularity, of identity defined as difference. Still, I sometimes long for writing courageous—or hubristic or long-lived—enough to dare to say something about the whole of the human condition: something that is almost certainly wrong, or at least incomplete, but that is nevertheless worth saying. from Subterranean Treasures by Nicolás Medina Mora [The Nation; ungated]
The Tricky Art of Living in a Body
General readers of American poetry probably know Bishop as the author of “One Art.” ... College students will be familiar with other poems and perhaps biographical details, including her increasing importance as a queer poet. Her alcohol use disorder is often there in the shadows, her asthma too. But what about her eczema, the first of three lifelong conditions to develop in childhood and the one that quite literally affected her ability to write? from Elizabeth Bishop’s Eczema by Jonathan Ellis
"He loves me, but apparently not in the way usual to men less gifted"
This is a digital edition, free-to-access, of the complete surviving correspondence between T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Emily Hale (1891–1969) – the 1,131 letters that Eliot sent to Hale between 1930 and 1957 (deposited at Princeton University Library, they were embargoed until 2020) – together with a number of important additional letters, including letters from Hale to Eliot, located at the Eliot Archive in London. The collection has been edited by John Haffenden (General Editor of The Letters of T. S. Eliot), who provides in addition a detailed chronology of the life and career of Emily Hale, and an Appendix of writings by Hale herself. This website features too a Gallery of photographs, and a fully searchable Index. All of the available documentation relating to the T. S. Eliot–Emily Hale relationship is presented here. [more inside]
“No Hyperbole Can Be Hyperbolic Enough”
When a galley arrives, many blurbers read no more than the publisher’s plot summary which is written by the editor or publicity department or both. It is then quite easy for a blurber to riff off of what they’ve been supplied. Blurbs generally share a common format across all genres of books: Author praise: “A talented writer who…”; “Her intelligence is such that….” One-word gushing: “electrifying”; “gripping.” Two-word slobbering: “wickedly smart”; “hauntingly beautiful.” Dubious equivalences: “as satisfying as it is unsettling”; “as sharply conceived as it is brilliantly written.” from Beware of Book Blurbs by GD Dess [The Millions]
A Razor’s Edge Tribe Between Phoniness and Dishonesty
In 1955, David Markson wrote a gushing fan letter to William Gaddis. In 1961, William Gaddis wrote back. [The Paris Review; ungated] [more inside]
The Comedian, the Flâneur, and, Most Recently, the Social Media Poster
The flâneur, the detective, and the comedian are precursors of the practitioners of the online cleverness that has become such a nuisance today. The Internet is a spaceless airport. Like passengers in an airport, its users are fundamentally idlers. They occupy themselves with browsing—both the objects available for consumption and their fellow consumers. They are placed in a similar but even more extreme position of impotent omnipotence. The world is at their feet, but they cannot really act in it except to pose and acquire. At the same time, the Internet enables control of people’s movements and desires in a way the airport could only dream of. All this naturally prompts a desire to wrest back some semblance of control. from The Impotence of Being Clever by Alexander Stern
"I wouldn’t write a book like this today."
When you live alone with characters you’re making up, you are more alone with yourself than you realize. Re-reading this book after twelve years, I see more clearly than I did then that it’s a hall of mirrors. Not everyone in it is me, but I distributed my own insecurities and madness quite liberally among the figures I modeled after people I knew. And the book I thought I was writing from such a dissembling distance from real life situations turns out to be transparently about people whom a great many other people reading it could readily identify. That doesn’t matter. I wasn’t indicting anybody in front of a grand jury. It isn’t a cruel book, or a score-settling one. from A Hall of Mirrors by Gary Indiana
A World of Petty Tyrannies
When I tell people I earn my living as a copyeditor, I am typically met with one of two responses: rapt admiration or an almost physical revulsion. from The World Through a Copyeditor’s Eyes by Jeff Reimer [The Bulwark]
At Some Point, Creative Destruction Simply Destroys
And yet, while dragging the likes of Apple CEO Tim Cook off to the whipping post may be fine sport, what’s the state of our own souls in all of this? We who encourage and enable these 21st-century digital robber barons? Are we their victims? Co-conspirators? Could we find our own way out of the walled garden? Do we even want to? from The Pulitzer winner who predicted Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes 25 years ago, a look at Steven Millhauser's 1997 novel, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
Long Roads Full of Switchbacks and Roundabouts
Like the novel itself, this essay has digressed. I set out to describe what it can be like to write a novel and why I think it’s worth all the work and uncertainty, and the same with reading them. Somehow I wound up wondering how we can all tolerate each other. from Why Write a Novel, Why Read a Novel, and Why Now? by Suzanne Berne [LitHub]
Bye-Frois
Online literary magazine Berfrois is shutting down. Some of its contributors say farewell. The archive will remain available.
For a While Everything Was Golden
Yet something did survive. In the deepest reaches of a closet was a stack of boxes packed by Eve’s mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside: journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and letters. No, inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and was centered in a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of L.A. The Franklin Avenue scene, I call it for reasons that will become apparent. And it had all the explosive vitality that the scene at Les Deux Magots on the Left Bank had for Ernest Hemingway and his fellow Lost boys. It was the making of one great American writer, the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another. These two writers were friends. Enemies as well. They were also women, a fact fundamental rather than incidental... from Joan Didion and Eve Babitz Shared an Unlikely, Uneasy Friendship—One That Shaped Their Worlds and Work Forever by Lili Anolik [ungated] [more inside]
Rollin' Barth
It’s one thing to find Barth’s fiction masturbatory—that’s a matter of taste—but it’s another to hold it morally responsible for the cultural degradation we associate with fast food, commercialism, and televisual self-consciousness run amok (an especial bête noire for Wallace). Such menaces, it seems fair to point out, more likely result from political and technological circumstances coextensive with postmodernity as a historical epoch rather than from the stylistic choices of any individual author, or group of authors. from Life in the Fap Lane
Bad Mary
Whatever I Write Will be Proven Wrong, Likely in Catastrophic Fashion
Who Will Win the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature? is Alex Shepard's annual guess [archive] [more inside]
Todos de luto en Redonda, el rey ha muerto
Blessed Are the Copyeditors, For Theirs is a War of Eternal Attrition
Utopia — Hope — Has Wings But Does Not Use Them
The foolish thought is that Europe is dual: the West of Rome and the East of Constantinople/Moscow. West is a colony of the USA, East a colony of China. As long as West does not recognise East and vice versa, as long as the two halves of the symbol do not unite, Europe — Europa — will remain that young woman abducted by the lust of an ancient and patriarchal god. from Open Letter to Europe by Chus Pato, translated by Erín Moure. [more inside]
[post] with a review of [name of author]'s [title]
[title] is both more and less than a novella; but mostly more. Caustic, biting, brutal, puzzling and punishing. Riddled with lapses, pockmarked with gaps and schisms, though overdetermined with nearly any and every cliché and esoteric allusion imaginable, [title] is too much and too little, a surplus of negativity, an excess of void. [title] refuses to stand still, its pages quivering restlessly between its covers, its scope unbounded despite only 87 pages. from [name of author]’s [title], Reviewed by Anthony Ballas [more inside]
Pierre Senges, l'auteur de la baleine
In Melville’s epic, the singular Ahab goes on a hunt for an equally singular creature; in Senges’s satire, everything and everyone has become generic: an act, an imitation, a copy, a plagiarism—a sequel. from The Hunted by Ryan Ruby [Archive] [more inside]
How Can People Be Expected to Live on These Salaries?
In most literary novels, there is little indication of how the protagonist earns a living and is able to afford their lifestyle, or if there are attempts at these indicators, it’s clear that the numbers don’t add up. from If They Want to Be Published, Literary Writers Can’t Be Honest About Money by Naomi Kanakia
“The answer is, two books that take on God and existence.”
Sixteen Years After ‘The Road,’ Cormac McCarthy Is Publishing Two New Novels [New York Times; Archive]
The Lem
‘Extrapolation’ may be a purer ideal. The term is imported from mathematics: a writer, keenly observing the world around them, can measure its trends and implications, then offer persuasive suppositions about what comes next. Yet, like multi-tasking or Tantric sex, extrapolation is easier to name than it is to find examples of people really doing it, or doing it well. A few, like Philip K. Dick, seem cursed to endure it as an abreactive symptom, a cry of protest at living through the 20th century. Stanisław Lem belongs in that company of SF writers – Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Kim Stanley Robinson – who have practised intentional extrapolation with regular and sustained success. from My Year of Reading Lemmishly by Jonathan Lethem [LRB; Archive] [more inside]
Sentir Tudo de Todas as Maneiras
Inventing an avant-garde movement and its principal protagonists, then attempting to institutionalize the movement with literary criticism written by yet more imagined personae: it seems, at first, insane. Indeed, Pessoa feared for his sanity as a youth, having watched his paternal grandmother lose her grip on reality. But as a student of fin-de-siècle theories that posited a correlation between artistic genius and mental degeneracy, Pessoa decided his mind was one thus afflicted. Regardless of its cause, Pessoa’s mad strategy succeeded. from Conceptual Personae - The many imagined lives of Fernando Pessoa [more inside]
Gen-U-Inly Superficial
I let my gaze rest on the pink ends of her two-tone hair, before moving down towards her very toned forearms, every inch of which were covered in the same sort of tattoos as Diego’s were. If it hadn’t been for Luis, I would have assumed that she was queer, not only because this appeared to be the one culture that it still seemed okay to appropriate, but also because she looked as if she might actually sleep with women. Then, I looked at Luis. He too was covered in tattoos, and although clearly not a cowboy he wore such incredibly high, pointed cowboy boots that he walked with even more of a swish than our barman: a moustachioed guy in hot-pants and a gold chain that spelled out ‘A-N-A-L’. And yet in spite, or more likely because of, these very particular and completely on-trend ambiguities the four of us blended perfectly together. from an extract from the upcoming book The Jacques Lacan Foundation by Susan Finlay
Haters Gonna Hate
—Christmas is almost down our throats.
Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. [more inside]
Before The Fictional Artist Inevitably Burns Out He's Always Fading Away
That writing fiction may finally be incompatible with adequately describing a work of art is the worry that shadows many of these novels. But, like Bergotte’s dying realization, they also suggest that the knowledge of this shortcoming is what makes writing worthwhile. From The Lives and Deaths of Fictional Artists by Sam Thorne
Something May Be Wrong With Literary Fiction Itself
To be clear: I’m not saying MFAs made all novels terrible or that all contemporary writing sucks. A writer isn’t deterministically destined to produce defensive prose if they go through the MFA process. Not all writers who’ve sat in a workshop are “workshop writers.” And some academic experiences are amazing, vital and electric, lighting up students’ minds inside like a moveable feast. But those are instances within a collective system. A system that has, in its totality, changed both how prose is written, who gets published, and who the audience for fiction is. from How the MFA swallowed literature by Erik Hoel
“Advance Promotional Copy: Do Not Read.”
At last, I asked: Why send it to me? “It’s like when you feed a stray cat and it leaves you a dead bird on your porch,” Prickett replied. “I sent it to you as a gift. I mailed Foodies to writers I admire and a few musicians. One film director, I think. A handful of lit professors and Weird Al Yankovic. If you got one, it’s because I liked something you wrote. It could be anything from a critical tome to a tweet. In your case, I liked a short story of yours,” he said. “And sorry, but I’m going to have to keep sending yours to your mom. It isn’t a perfect system but it’s the one we have.” On the Trail of a Mysterious, Pseudonymous Author by Adam Dalva [The New Yorker; archive] [more inside]
B Girls
My deepest pleasures come from accounts of and by the original B girls. Those lucky few who, given the chance to create a school in their own image, rose to the occasion. Free to decide on their classes and lifestyles, these pioneers rejected dogma, prohibition, curfews, and dress codes, embraced annual non-resident work terms, and, as a decades-long study by sociologists proved, almost routinely turned their backs on the politics of their conservative daddies. From The Bennington Girl by Jill Eisenstadt
"Merry Christmas," the man threatened
“…anyone who doubts the evidence need only visit this locked room in Croton where lunacy and organization struggle with one another. But after all that’s what both books are about.” from “Lunacy and Organization” in the William Gaddis Papers by Joel Minor [Part 1] [Part 2] [more inside]
Bloomsday to Zoomsday
Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place in 1904, the date of his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom. [more inside]
Carver Made Him Look Prissy, David Foster Wallace Rendered Him Unhip
“He’s always being discovered”
Dioretix. Science of matter over mind. You'd better read it and quick.
Plugged In On a Stronger Current
Roseboro’—she fiercely defended that apostrophe, reserving her family name, Roseborough, for her life on the stage—was more zealous than many a missionary. She was utterly convinced that books were all that mattered in life. She offered to give one promising young writer her ideas “as you put cloves into an apple you are going to roast.” And yet, though she championed voices who are today seen as canonical and left behind a literary legacy with which few other readers and editors can compete, she died destitute, rarely leaving her rented rooms on Staten Island. From The Strange, Forgotten Life of Viola Roseboro’ by Stephanie Gorton
Adios AMIGO and Watch Out for the FLORR
Charles Portis, an Arkansas native best known for his 1968 novel True Grit, died on Monday at a Little Rock hospice facility. He was 86. [Arkansas Online] [more inside]
Even The Nicer Moments Are a Little Intolerable
The appeal is undeniable: a simple story of coming out of the shadow of a Great Man. Yet I don’t think that’s the process either of these books is really describing. There’s nothing straightforward in finding independence by way of dating a famous man. There are also tangled questions of agency and desire, of what’s in it for anyone who attaches herself to a celebrity. Infinite Jerk by Laura Marsh [The New Republic] [more inside]
Elizabeth, Flush & The Fancy
Celebrated for her sonnets and her long masterpiece Aurora Leigh , [Elizabeth Barrett Browning] is now perhaps best remembered in popular culture for the lines “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Elizabeth also had a powerful reserve of inner strength. Nobody could have predicted how she would turn the robbery of her beloved dog into a triumph over oppression in her life. The Dognapping of the Century by Olivia Rutigliano [from TrulyAdventurous via LitHub]
Rocket is Nowhere Near so Central as One Would Suppose
“Shakespeare is God”
Professor [Harold] Bloom (July 11, 1930 - October 14, 2019) was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as often betraying literature’s essential purpose. --NYT Obituary [more inside]
"It was not easy to be the target of so many people"
"It’s the story of a half-black, half-Jewish heroine’s search for her father; a postmodern dismantling of the Greek myth of Theseus; a send-up of American myths of racial purity and authenticity; a tall tale featuring a teenage heroine who one-ups Pam Grier in badassery, Albert Einstein in brilliance, and Cary Grant in nonchalance; and an exuberant and acrobatic experiment with language itself." --Scott Saul on Oreo by Fran Ross, in a wide-ranging essay on the author. [LARB] [more inside]
Nobody Cares What Happens After the Lights Dim
It Turns Out the Industry Values Whiteness
Comps reveal a great deal about the diversity of publishing and the experience of people of color within it. These data should give us pause about any self-congratulatory “strides.” Comp titles show us which books and which authors publishers most value; they become a target at which editors, agents, and aspiring authors aim. The dearth of writers of color as frequent and influential comps — both within and across genres — shows that writers of color still do not enjoy a broad influence behind the scenes. They don’t seem to be shaping acquisitions decisions at a high level. Even best-selling novels by writers of color are highly unlikely to change the decisions that publishers make about which books to acquire and by whom. "Comping White" by Laura B. McGrath in the LARB