Dennis Lehane on just how easy it is to spend five years writing a historical epic: “How the fuck am I gonna finish this? What did I get myself into? This is going to be the one everyone figures out I’m full of shit.”
The publication date for Curtis Sittenfeld‘s American Wife in the U.K. has been moved up from Feb. 2009 to, uh, yesterday.
Jack Kerouac‘s early days as a football prospect and wannabe sportswriter.
Writing in Prospect, Julian Gough finds a way to whack David Foster Wallace and George Saunders simultaneously. The complaint—which you may have heard recently—is that a writer’s ambition and creativity gets stifled when he or she is planted in academia. Bring it, Julian:
[I]t happens to most American academic novelists (like the superbly gifted writer George Saunders who, at 49, has still never written a novel or left school.) They waste time on America’s debased, overwhelming, industrial pop culture. They attack it with an energy appropriate to attacking fascism, or communism, or death. But that culture (bad television, movies, ads, pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating, billion-dollar cur. It has to be chosen to be consumed, so it flashes its tits, laughs at your jokes, replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn’t worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes.
markathitakis.com 