Muriel Spark almost wasn’t a novelist
Muriel Spark turned to novels late and easily could have ended up not writing them at all. Good thing her friend Tony Strachan “positively nagged me about the waste of my talent.” (Thanks, Amitava.)
Muriel Spark turned to novels late and easily could have ended up not writing them at all. Good thing her friend Tony Strachan “positively nagged me about the waste of my talent.” (Thanks, Amitava.)
Paris Review editor Lorin Stein “will happily quote your favorite poem” or “write whatever you tell me to, as long as it’s non-actionable and clean” on your holiday subscription card.
From Hawthorne to Twain to White to Roth: if American fiction and personal essays “are at times nearly impossible to distinguish,” it’s “because they share a common ancestor.” (Thanks, NYRB.)
The Millions’ excellent Year in Reading series — featuring new discoveries from writers and critics, including John Banville, Fiona Maazel, and Stephen Dodson — begins for 2010.
Asphalt always gets to me, but the malaise is never worse than after the leaves fall, before the first snow, when the trees are bare and the sky is dark and all I see when I look up and down Ocean Parkway from my terrace is gray, gray, and more gray. Even as I narrow in on the end of . . .