The self-proclaimed most rejected published novelist has died at age 74.
Nabokov: “Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.”
It’s Michael SHAY-bahn, not CHA-bone. And don’t get me started on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Faulkner: “When I found poetry not suited to what I had to say, I changed my medium. At 21 I thought my poetry very good. At 22 I began to change my mind. At 23 I quit. I use a poetic quality in my writing. After all, prose is poetry.”
Calling all Potter fans: read Dumbledore’s death in the style of Chaucer. Or Marquez. Or Hemingway. Or e.e. cummings. Or Pound. Or more.
Seth Abramson on identity, among other topics: “A well-known poet once told me I wasn’t a real poet, and would never understand poets, because I’d gone to law school; he suggested I quit writing because I clearly wasn’t committed to the hardscrabble life of a poet–that’s what becoming a public defender signified to this particular member of our community.”
If newspapers in general are going the way of the dinosaur, what about handwritten newspapers?