About a year ago I posted about Michael Fauver, a novelist who was blogging about his experience at writers’ retreats. A few people in the comments to that post expressed their dislike for such places. Fauver has read those comments, and he responds in “In Defense of Colonies and Workshops.”
Samuel R. Delany‘s epic dystopian novel Dhalgren has been adapted for the stage as Bellona, Destroyer of Cities.
Walter Mosley: “Through my veins run 10,000 years of history that touches every continent, deity, and crime known to humanity.”
Lewis Lapham on how the recession might affect writers: “It might make them see more clearly what kind of society that they’re living in. A lot of the writing for the last 20-odd years has been very self-absorbed — the memoir instead of the portrait of the society. It might encourage writers to engage more with the society as a whole. It might force them to look more carefully at other people.”
The Web site of Canada’s National Post is hosting a roundtable on Colum McCann‘s Let the Great World Spin.
American fiction about the Vietnam War doesn’t attract much interest in Vietnam.
Ray Bradbury figures the idea that new technologies distance us from ourselves isn’t anything new: “I grew up with radio, I saw what radio did to a people. I saw that it was beginning to disconnect us in society.”
Years of BASS uses Nicholson Baker‘s story “K. 590” as an opportunity to discuss archiving techniques at newspapers.
A Smithsonian article on the early history of the paperback shares a great anecdote about a wounded soldier biding his time in a foxhole reading Willa Cather‘s Death Comes for the Archbishop: “He grabbed it the day before under the delusion that it was a murder mystery, but he discovered, to his amazement, that he liked it anyway.”
A few metalheads are disputing whether Metallica‘s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” has anything to do with the Ernest Hemingway novel. Which is besides the point; as I’ve pointed out before, Cormac McCarthy is the truly metal American novelist.
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