Given all the years you spent writing your book or composing your music or perfecting your play before someone came along and spat on it, it’s extraordinarily difficult to respond to a bad review with grace.
“The Last and Best of the Peter Pans” and “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” have never been published in the nearly sixty years since Salinger wrote them. Princeton’s Firestone Library now protects the only known copies.
The rhythm of school is conducive to the writing of small things, not big things, and we don't try hard enough to think beyond that rhythm because, for many of us, it’s the only rhythm we know.
And so he whirled mirthlessly on, flourishing the word "prose" like a magic wand, working pale variations on his "Reader's Manifesto." In your face, Jonathan Franzen!
“I think the single most defining characteristic of a writer” – I found myself saying to a friend the other day, when she asked my thoughts on the teaching of writing – “I mean the difference between a writer and someone who ‘wants to be a writer,’ is a high tolerance for uncertainty.”
I like following Lisa's blog because, for whatever reason, her narrative is compelling. Following it is somewhat akin to watching a reality TV show (Not one of the ones where they try to out-dance each other or diet for money, but one that just follows someone's daily life). She's my Jersey Shore.
In any other book, I would see these tactics as pandering to the baser instincts of the reading public. But in this book, in which Mikael is so obviously a stand-in for Stieg, it's just tacky. Especially since this Stieg/Mikael amalgamation has also appointed himself head of the Respecting Women Committee.
With 2001's The Corrections, Franzen would seem to have perfected his maximalist method. What might it mean to say that his new novel, Freedom, finds him maturing?
I began to suspect I was too susceptible to the idea of the “writer’s desk” and decided it might be better to do without one. Somewhere along the way, I began to work in libraries. More important, I began to get work done in libraries.