I work on my book in sections. Right now I’m slogging through the third part — filling in gaps, fleshing out scenes, tinkering with dialogue. I move ahead five, maybe ten, pages a week. Every few days I print out the most recent version and promise myself I won’t change another word until I’ve pushed to the end of, for . . .
Sad news this morning: the great Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and
On Saturday I dragged Max and some friends to Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage in the Bronx. No sooner did we enter Poe Park than Kevin and I were drawn to this bulbous, warty tree (at right of photo), which looks even more diseased up-close. We moved toward it simultaneously and started fondling its lumps. “It looks like someone stuck . . .
Amitava Kumar, whose site I read daily, applauds the NY Times Book Review‘s decision to assign a David Foster Wallace review (The Postmodern Moralist) to Pankaj Mishra. Usually, folks of the tinted persuasion aren’t really expected to have any cogent views of the likes of John Updike or Philip Roth. J.M. Coetzee? Maybe. Zadie Smith? Sure. But, Jonathan Franzen? No!…. . . .
I never knew how a Mississippi girl like Donna Tartt ended up transferring to Vermont’s Bennington College from Ole Miss, but this brief excerpt from Larry L. King’s forthcoming In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor goes a long way toward explaining the move. One day a young Ole Miss miss — Donna . . .