You never know it’s coming until it’s there
Nina MacLaughlin admires Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas, “a guided circuit of a ruined world.”
Nina MacLaughlin admires Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas, “a guided circuit of a ruined world.”
The narrator of Nicholson Baker’s latest novel sets famous couplets to music, and Levi Asher plays one.
Emma and I enjoyed the novelist Margaret Drabble’s recent observation that depression is useful “for stripping off ways of getting through life that prevent you from having to think.” “Happy and buoyant don’t force you into action on the page,” Drabble (pictured, in an earlier era) told Daphne Merkin. These kinds of arguments in favor of depression as a creative . . .
If there’s anything autobiographical in Dan Chaon’s fiction, he says, it’s the feeling of being an outsider.