I’m focused on my own writing right now, thus the dearth of longer posts, slowdown in reviewing, and trickle of remainders. I feel guilty about it, if that helps. A couple weeks ago, I was reading Rupert Thomson’s gorgeously evocative, meticulously pared-down This Party’s Got to Stop. About a third of the way through, I had to take a break. . . .
In Chekhov, writes James Lasdun, literature seems to face us, “for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness [and] our unfathomable strangeness.”
Another great essay in the LRB: Tom McCarthy says French writers who’ve come of age in the past 30 years have had to grapple with the question, what do you do after the nouveau roman?
Annals of literary invective: Faulkner once called Twain a “hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe.”
Paul Ford, mastermind of the Harper’s website, talks paywalls at The Awl. (The subscription is worth it for the archives alone.)