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Audio interviews with scores of writers of all kinds, including many speculative fictioneers and discussions of writing, writers and the writing process.

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An odd, but intriguing experiment combining DIY and "Choose a Path" ideas with social writing.

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I, too, have an instinctive belief that learning to write by hand has benefits not found in writing by keyboard, but I'm still not convinced by most of the reasoning, including Eco's. 

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"I realize that this is what I've spent the past 10 years trying to do with prose: To write so that my ideas are sharply defined, vivid, and pleasurable. The process has required a painful unlearning of nearly all I'd been taught as a professional."

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"But could some alleged plagiarists—like Maureen Dowd, Chris Anderson, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and even Viswanathan, who all either deny the charge, or blame their copying on unconscious mistakes—be guilty of psychological sloppiness rather than fraud? Could the real offense be disregard for the mind's subliminal kleptomania? And if it is real, is unconscious copying (or "cryptomnesia" to those who study the phenomenon) preventable?"

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Archive of Wormser's poetry, essays, talks, links to books, etc. Good stuff.

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Insightul... "With the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce. Against what he believed to be the outmoded theoretical commitments of his predecessors and contemporaries, he labored to return literary fiction to the deep problems of subjective experience. For those of us who came of age in the 1990s, his fiction was a relief and a gift. Confused, alienated and inauthentic though it might be, subjective consciousness still existed—and it was still the business of the novelist to describe it."

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Most of Infinite Jest, I think, does not do this approximate deconstruction act; the bulk of it is what can be defined as specialist realism—which I think is actually a broadly popular mode of writing. I don't think very many people mind writerly ostentation by itself: there are simply far too many popular authors who are grossly ostentatious for this to be the case. And readers of all kinds are capable of showing enormous patience with heavily-detailed and at times rather tedious passages of questionable importance to the overall novel. "Specialist realism" is not terribly problematic to most readers, and is often even considered enjoyable. (Consider, here, Wallace's enthusiasm for Tom Clancy: there is not as great a distance between the two as one might think.) This mode of writing, however, sometimes slips into a different mode of writing that is indecisively subversive—a lukewarm irony that I think turns nearly everyone off. This is present, too, in Infinite Jest, and in order to have a conversation among people who really like the book and people who can't get through it, I think it's necessary to begin by separating this lukewarmness from the specialist realism that actually makes the novel so captivating.

Wallace may have had very well-thought-out, very theoretically smart reasons for trying to have things both (or more) ways, for trying to be indecisive, but there are lots of things which are really theoretically well-grounded which are simply annoying. I'm sure there are folks who think that the lukewarm ironical mode is really brilliant and is actually the most brilliant thing about the novel. I'd be happy to hear those arguments, but I want to make clear that I don't really find this lukewarmness all that much of an obstacle to enjoying the book. So please, don't confuse me with attacking Wallace or "hysterical realism" or any of that stuff.

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"In this enlightening book James Boyle describes what he calls the range wars of the information age—today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Boyle argues that just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen should also understand intellectual property law. Why? Because intellectual property rights mark out the ground rules of the information society, and today’s policies are unbalanced, unsupported by evidence, and often detrimental to cultural access, free speech, digital creativity, and scientific innovation."

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"And indeed, knowing what readers want is at the heart of the diabolical success of this book. What is especially interesting about Atonement in the light of McEwan’s status as a popular but serious manipulator, is the delicate way it makes readers aware of their own desire to be gratified by serious narrative manipulation." -- James Wood is a frustrating, but brilliant critic!

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"Overrated: Gertrude Stein. She played an important role in the development of modernism, but she played it for men. And she is just not readable. She became viewed as a "sister": That doesn't sanctify her work. We can criticize it. [...] I look with a critical eye at contemporary poetry, too. There are a great many talented woman poets today, but I don't think any of them measure up to a Sylvia Plath or Adrienne Rich. I don't feel any male poets do either."

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The Elements of Style was essentially a book of pointers and admonitions: Do this, don’t do that. As principles they were invaluable, but they were only principles, existing without context or reality. What his book didn’t teach was how to apply those principles to the various forms that nonfiction writing can take, each with its special requirements: travel writing, science writing, business writing, the interview, memoir, sports, criticism, humor. That’s what I taught in my course, and it’s what I would teach in my book. I wouldn’t compete with The Elements of Style; I would complement it.

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had occasion to send a pre-publication version of The Worcester Review article [on slam poetry] to Donald Hall and he wrote back to disagree with virtually every assertion I had made. That was the beginning of what to me has been a fascinating correspondence.

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Among the qualities—beauty, intelligence, grace, complexity, facility of language, wit, among countless other literary virtues—that distinguishes Lolita as a work of art is the fact that it functions as the opposite of and the antidote to programs like To Catch a Predator. Lolita deepens our well of compassion and sympathy, whether we like it or not.

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Support small presses!

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David Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass "Infinite Jest."

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The month of poetry (and cruelty) is nearly among us...

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The most common complaint among revisionist biographers and doting critics of Franz Kafka is that, in the eighty-odd years since his death, the deification of the writer has reduced his work to the level of the aphorism.

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An interesting idea. Very microbloggish.

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"Updike's most enduring legacy exists at the level of the sentence. If you count swinging Saul Bellow as a Canadian, Montreal-born, and also class Vladimir Nabokov as a transnational, all-transcending anomaly, then Updike is, line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the postwar era: meticulous, crystalline, and luminously hyperrealist, his opulent language hanging on austere forms. Even his bad writing—and the consequence of his three-pages-per-day prolificity is that there's no shortage of it—sparks with phrases that send the heart skittering. "

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