The Second Pass is throwing a party at Melville House Bookstore this Wednesday night, and I’ll be reading a very brief excerpt from the novel I’m finishing up. The other contributors reading are Carlene Bauer (Not That Kind of Girl), Will Blythe (To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever), and Jason Zinoman, theater critic for the New York . . .
Joshua Cohen characterizes The Instructions as “a very long joke … that lacks a punch line.” I can see not buying the voice, but, for whatever my goyishe perspective is worth, I completely disagree with his reading. (More & more.)
Q: What distracts you from writing? A: Thoughts of money and death, and … the sexiest painting I know. — From a John Banville Q&A. See also Banville on death: not fear but fury.
James Baldwin, “like Emerson, renounced the pulpit—he had been a fiery boy preacher in Harlem—and readers have found in the writings of each the atmosphere of church.”
My mystification that Muriel Spark isn’t more widely read has continued to grow, but last week her editor, New Directions publisher Barbara Epler, offered a theory in email that echoes what Howard Jacobson has said about the devaluation of comedy in literature. “The fact that she is so unbelievably and witchily entertaining,” Epler argues, “has kept her from her full . . .