Joyce Carol Oates I’ve got a story about me and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. And a video, somewhere, of me telling it to her…to Joyce Carol Oates. She probably forgot about it as soon as I told it but it was a wow moment, in the moment. You could see it on her face.
Browsing category books
Something that’s neither here nor there but comes to mind because it comes to mind. Whenever I think of Joyce Carol Oates I always have this image of her running through Hyde Park. Long and lean and listening. Alone, with her internal self. What conversations they must have. I’ve just finished reading The Falls. And
“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” – Wilfred Owen Wilfred Owen – Poetry of The Great War Wilfred Owen (whom I adore…exceedingly) was a British poet and soldier who signed up for the Artists’ Rifles in 1915. He was known for his shocking, realistic war poetry
In 1952 Nabokov was invited to Harvard by Professor Harry T. Levin and others as a visiting professor. He taught an undergraduate lecture course in the novel and did research on Pushkin in Widener Library. It was during this period that his son Dmitri was an undergraduate at Harvard, and that the Poetry Room recorded
Matthew Parker was a figure of the English Reformation and a benefactor to the University of Cambridge. An avid book collector who salvaged medieval manuscripts dispersed at the dissolution of the monasteries, his greatest tangible legacy is his library of manuscripts and early printed books (which span more than a thousand years) entrusted to Corpus
The shortlist of the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced today. The 8 titles were selected from a total of 156 novels nominated by 163 public library systems in 123 cities worldwide and includes three British writers and American author Marilynne Robinson. 1. The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker (Dutch) in translation. 2. The
Since 1953, when the first issue of The Paris Review appeared with an interview of E. M. Forster, the magazine’s Q&A encounters with the great writers of our times have come to be recognized as a sort of literary genre unto themselves: The Paris Review interview. Nadine Gordimer (c) Dan Porges There are other interviews
“My new found spirituality made it essential to me that we not battle. So this was my position – I would neither defend myself from him, nor would I fight him. For the longest time, against he counsel of all who cared about me, I resisted even consulting a lawyer, because I considered even that
“The best thing in winter was driving home, after her day teaching music in the Rough River schools. It would already be dark, and on the upper streets of the town snow might be falling, while rain lashed the car on the coastal highway. Joyce drove beyond the limits of the town into the forest,
Last month Rachel Cusk had a brilliant article in the Guardian on women’s writing. She made several good points that illustrate the conundrum many of us find ourselves in. Importantly, she asked whether women’s writing should seek equivalence or distinction from its male counterpart. She’s inclined to agree with Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf
“I hold the blank page headed Friday November Thirteenth to the light of that day. There seems to my eye some discrepancy between the two. There, outside is the day; as it happens, bluish, cloudy, still and fine. Here is the page; white, smooth. How am I to bring about a marriage between them? But
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner
