Articles by Bill Morris
May 9, 2012
The Appeals and Perils of the One-Word Book Title 28
At their best, one-word titles distill content to its purest essence, which is what all titles strive to do, and then they stick in the mind. Sometimes, of course, they fall flat, and much of the time they’re just lukewarm and vague or, worse, falsely grand.
April 25, 2012
The Treacherous Journey From Page to Screen 6
The overused word “unfilmable” should be banished from the lexicon.
April 5, 2012
The Riches of White Trash 10
Are poor rural white people really neglected in American literature? Hardly. They might be routinely scorned, marginalized, misunderstood, and reduced to caricature, but they’re not neglected. In fact, the canon is larded with writers who’ve put the riches of white trash culture to wondrous use.
March 29, 2012
The Writer’s Bedroom 1
We recently ran a piece called “Where We Write,” in which our staff writers posted photographs of their work spaces. Apartment Therapy has taken it a step further and revealed where some famous and not-so-well-known writers slept. Turns out a bedroom, like a work space, speaks volumes about a writer. But one question remains: What [...]
March 22, 2012
John Leonard Died for Our Sins 6
I’m glad I haven’t read anything Leonard wrote about Nixon after 1975. My guess is it would be like watching someone empty an Uzi into a lifeless Clydesdale.
February 27, 2012
Scott Donaldson on the “Impossible Craft” of Writing Biography 10
“If you fall in love with your subject, you can so identify with your subject that you lose something of your own self to it. The first two biographers of Malcolm Lowry who was a suicide, they both killed themselves. Maybe they had that inclination to begin with. But that can happen.”
