Why I’m keeping a Writing Log
I’ve started to keep a journal of my writing. More specifically, I’ve dedicated a paragraph-long section of my daily journal to writing about my writing, detailing the progress I’m making…
Colum McCann’s “Everything in This Country Must”
Colum McCann’s prose has some of the “Old Testament on LSD” lyricism of Cormac McCarthy, but mellowed by a much more linear and human narrative. “Everything in This Country…
Reading Goals For 2016
2015 was a bad year for reading women. Out of the 130 books I read, only 12 of them were written by female authors. The reasons for this are numerous…
Relatability, Misery Porn, and Denis Johnson’s “The Laughing Monsters”
Denis Johnson’s latest novel is dark. This is not uncharted territory for the man, but the bleakness here is obliterating. There is a detached and passive depression in the…
Don’t Forget about The Art of Fiction
Image via The Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews Just a bit of a PSA today. Unless you have an ontological opposition to reading interviews, you should absolutely check out the…
The Tenth of December, the Limits of Irony (and the Best Kind of Irony)
image via Goodreads Saunders is very much a known entity, but that’s certainly no strike against the man. He’s got a style that (among many other things) seems to both…
The Grapes of Wrath and the Journals Behind the Book
The Grapes of Wrath is another one of those American classics that I somehow avoided reading in high school. Getting to read all of these canonical tomes as an adult…
Tender is the Night and Re-reading Gatsby, or “Yes, Francis, We Know You Want to be Old Money”
I almost didn’t make it through Tender is the Night. I think I only pushed through the god-awful first act because the book is considered Fitzgerald’s best, and I wanted…
“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” and -just read it already it’s a great goddamn novel, ok?
One of my favorite novels of the year, this book does very many things extremely well. It’s one of the best examples of free indirect narrations I’ve ever come across,…
Denis Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son” and my protestations at the alleged death of the short story
This is one of the seminal short story collections of the last few years (or, as some less charitable critics might put it, one of the last dying gasps of…