Just about every time my father-in-law (above) and I talked on the phone, we began by filling each other in on whatever progress we’d made with the books we were writing. I don’t remember exactly when he decided to start working on a study of Macbeth, but I remember his interest developing and his arguments germinating, and I remember clinking . . .
At FSG’s Work In Progress, Jeffrey Eugenides talks with Jonathan Galassi about the genesis of the “more tightly dramatized, less fanciful” novel he’s finishing up.
Emma Garman admires Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03, calling the novella “Nabokovian in its outrageously solipsistic stylishness.” See also Valtat on the persistence of childhood.
As you can see, I have the best in-laws. That’s Larry on the left, and Jane on the right, and though they divorced years ago — long before I met them — they’re both still this fun and campy. Right now I’m reading Old Mortality, a gift from Larry. He figured I would appreciate Sir Walter Scott’s meditation on fanaticism, . . .
On Friday night I’ll be introducing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as she opens the last event of Girls Write Now’s Chapters series with a reading from her short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck. I’ve written about my admiration for her work many times; since then, she’s won a MacArthur Fellowship and earned a place on The New Yorker’s 20 . . .