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 […]
June 29, 2018
How Fiction “Works”
Last week, I was at a reading by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer at Book Soup in West Hollywood, and I had the good fortune to hear him answer […]
May 31, 2018
Should Fiction Writers Study Literary Theory?
In her 2010 review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, Elif Batuman makes the following observation: a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in […]
January 4, 2018
Difficult and Devoted: My Abbreviated 2017 Reading List
Another year has come and gone. As always, I wish I had read more—to have spent more hours of this year alone, in the quiet, with nothing but a book, […]
June 6, 2017
Excerpts from Fiction that Capture My Own Awkward Adolescence
While reading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, a sprawling novel that follows Harvard student Selin through her first year of college and her first romantic infatuation, I came across a description […]
September 21, 2010
Wishes and Whips
What is wrong with books? What is wrong with me that I so love reading about what’s wrong with the stuff I love? When I see links cropping up on […]