September 30, 2019
Why We Should Call it Art
There’s a tendency in the writing community to be suspicious of the word “art.” For a lot of people, the word is pretentious, a grandiose attempt to elevate our writing […]
September 16, 2019
What Makes a Character Human?
It’s been almost twenty years ago now since James Wood penned (metaphorically speaking, of course, since I’m sure he used a computer) his famous critique of a genre of literary […]
August 27, 2019
An Interview with Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Author of White Dancing Elephants
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of reading Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut short story collection White Dancing Elephants. It’s a mesmerizing group of stories, filled with both joy and sorrow, […]
August 14, 2019
On Capturing the Banality of History
In the first chapter of the sixth book of A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s twelve-book series chronicling upper-class English social life in the early twentieth century, […]
July 26, 2019
On the Importance of the Authorial Voice
In his book The Art of Perspective, part of Graywolf Press’s series of craft books on writing (which I’ve written about a few times before on this blog), Christopher Castellani […]
July 16, 2019
On Writing as Wish Fulfillment
I was in elementary school when I first started “writing” stories—I would take the Hot Wheels toy cars I’d collected since I was a toddler, name them all after my […]
July 9, 2019
On Reading Your Work Out Loud
When I wrote my first novel, Portrait of Sebastian Khan, I often worked in cafes, if I was lucky at a corner table where I could angle my screen away […]
June 19, 2019
Ken Kesey’s “Keyhole of Literature”
In an essay published in The New York Times in 1989 (incidentally, the year I was born), Ken Kesey recounts a writing lesson he once received from short story writer […]
June 7, 2019
On the World War II Novel
Writing fiction about World War II from the vantage of the twenty-first century presents a rare challenge. Of all of history’s wars, this one has always felt the most uncomplicated, […]
May 22, 2019
Close-Reading the Rhythm of a Thomas Pynchon Sentence
If you’ve read enough of my blog posts, you’ll likely realize that I have an abiding interest in the rhythm of sentences. In a blog post on first lines, I […]
May 14, 2019
On Richard Powers’s The Overstory
It’s an almost universally accepted notion now that good literature comes down to character. Scholars have long argued that the rise of the novel in Europe coincides with the rise […]
April 26, 2019
In Defense of a Literary Canon
Mild controversy erupted on Twitter early this month after Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg released a list of his ten favorite books. To me, the list felt a little like […]