Dang, y’all. I started streaming the first season of Friday Night Lights at 11 o’clock Saturday night and apart from sleeping and eating haven’t done much since but keep selecting the next episode on Netflix. I hear it’s great TV even if you don’t like football. What with the Dallas, Miami, and Gainesville in my background, I can’t speak to . . .
“I met him in England and he read a manuscript of mine, said this won’t do but it’s almost there.” — Harry Crews on Graham Greene, his “main-most man,” and his own ill health, and more. (Page 67 of near-unnavigable PDF.)
Salon chose eight novel excerpts for its first Good Sex in Fiction Contest, and asked Louis Bayard, Walter Kirn, Laura Miller, and me to judge and discuss them. I ranked the Franzen highest, and also outed myself as a total pervert. The problem with these excerpts is — and I didn’t entirely realize this until I started reading for the . . .
For the first time in forty years, The Paris Review will serialize a novel: Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich, illustrated by Leanne Shapton. Also in the issue: a John Jeremiah Sullivan essay, interviews with Anne Beattie and Janet Malcolm, and more.
Please excuse the ugliness. I need to update WordPress, and once that’s done the remainders will be back in the middle column where they belong. It’s still quiet here, I know, and that’s because, yes, I’m still working on my novel. 73,500 words, eight of ten chapters revised, nearing the end but not there yet. I find myself relating a . . .