Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and is deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary…
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may…
Several delusions weaken the writer’s resolve to throw away work. If he has read his pages too often, those pages will have a necessary quality, the ring of the inevitable, like poetry known by heart. They will perfectly answer their own familiar rhythms. He will…
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016 (645pp. illus., $30). At the height of its splendor in the era A.D. 650-800, Baghdad was a magnificent city, its parks, gardens, schools, hospitals, charitable foundations, mosques and bathhouses “lavishly…
Writing a book, full time, takes between two and ten years. The long poem, John Berryman said, takes between five and ten years…Flaubert wrote steadily, with only the usual appalling strains. For twenty-five years he finished a big book every five to seven years…On plenty…
Worster, Donald. Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance, Oxford University Press, New York, 2016 (265pp.$27.95). Kansas has reason to be proud of Donald Worster, one of America’s foremost environmental historians. As a distinguished professor at the University of Kansas for more…
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers…
Michael Herr died last June 23, 2016, a sad day. Herr’s book “Dispatches” was the only true news from the war I remember. I was subject to the draft during the War, fought not in Vietnam but in the streets of the United States, and…
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…Do you like sentences?” The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years…
Sorokin, Vladimir (trans. Jamey Gambrell). The Blizzard, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2016 (181pp. $23) Bouts of spastic lust, dramatic descents into despondence followed by petulant ascents towards mania, simple bad humor, and a frequent taste for intoxicants like homemade vodka (and even rubbing…