Meandering Through a Literary Life
I’ve heard such good things about Margaret Atwood for years, but never managed to get around to reading one of her novels. I mostly do my reviews on Goodreads these days, but this being one of the best novels I’ve read this year made me want to devote a blog post to it. Narrative Structure … Read more
I’ve brought up John Ashbery a few times in previous posts. Over the past year, I’ve read his fifth book of poems entitled Three Poems (yes, it is a whole book, but only three poems long). These three poems are some of his most difficult and dense material (hence the year of non-continuous effort). Some … Read more
Today we’re going to examine some prose from Nell Zink’s newest novel Mislaid. She came to prominence last year, when her debut novel, The Wallcreeper was championed by the New York Times as a notable book of the year. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately, this post is going to … Read more
Today, let’s turn to the master himself, John Cheever. As I said in the first post on the series, many say this modern “MFA” set of rules teaches people to write like Cheever. What might be surprising is just how often he doesn’t follow them. Today’s rule is the roughest of them all. Avoid Narrative … Read more
Today I’ll pick a passage from Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs to talk about. I really wanted to do something from McEwan, because he is considered the quintessential example of clean, clear writing for our time. I’ve read many of his books (including the more famous ones), but I only own two of the lesser-known ones, … Read more
Michael Chabon is one of the masters of prose writing today. Let’s see what we can learn by examining his prose. Preamble If you read any modern book on writing or editing, you’ll find the same sets of rules to follow over and over. These rules come out of an aesthetic known as minimalism. It … Read more
Today’s composer to know is Julia Wolfe. Recently Julia Wolfe’s piece Anthracite Fields won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. I had been planning on including Wolfe in this series anyway because she is a founder of one of the most important contemporary music collectives: Bang on a Can. If you don’t know about this, it came … Read more
The first time I read Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, I had nothing but criticism for it. I’ll try to set the stage for my first reading. It was my early undergraduate days about 10 years ago. A First Reading I had had a fairly sheltered childhood. I grew up in a highly apolitical house. At … Read more
I feel I may have been a little unfair in choosing “From Work to Text” last post. In the same collection of essays, Image – Music – Text, is a much better introduction to what Barthes is known for: (post-)structuralism. Recall that structuralism began back in the very early 1900’s (maybe even very late 1800’s) … Read more
Roland Barthes was a prolific and important academic literary critic in the mid 20th century. He published many books, but his most famous are probably S/Z, Mythologies, and Image – Music – Text. The essay “From Work to Text” comes from this last book. I thought I’d continue from Sontag into Barthes since he was … Read more
