One more quick note on recent reading. I just read E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. The short is a great little science fiction story that predicts television, the internet, youtube, internet chats and commenting all a good 60 years before the internet is invented. What is more, it does a good job of describing how [...]
I have been putting off jotting down some notes on Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, so here are a couple bullets, partly so that I just get them down, and partly because I’m afraid Eco would intellectually beat me up if I misrepresent him.
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods is a book [...]
Following E.M. Forster’s ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL, this past week I read James Wood’s HOW FICTION WORKS, a poetic analysis of the novel illuminating parts not touched by Lubbock and Forster. Wood draws on examples from through out literature’s history, giving particular attention to Flaubert as the one who changed everything.
HOW FICTION WOKRS [...]
Last year I read Percy Lubbock’s THE CRAFT OF FICTION, which was insightful and entertaining in a slightly dated way. Reading it made me realize how few books have been devoted to the structure of the novel, and I believe this is one reason E.M. Forster’s ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL receives so much praise. Forster [...]
A little while ago, Craig over at the book review site Somebody Dies asked me to do a little guest blogging. I wrote a bit about setting’s place in THE COMMITTEE, which he posted on his site this morning. It’s a great little site for lovers of crime novels, with a bunch of other bits [...]
John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces does its best to capture the atmosphere of New Orleans through a handful of larger than life zany characters. These characters continually run into each other creating the affect that the city itself consists of only about twenty or so people, each of which has their own quirks and [...]
After having a recent conversation about Tom Stoppard, I decided to read his 1962 play THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND. It’s a play I first saw in high school and enjoyed but never revisited. I was surprised by a couple of things. I enjoyed it despite the lack of any real character development; it is a [...]
I mentioned a bit ago that I had put the last book I wrote, THE COMMITTEE, up for sale on Amazon’s Kindle platform to understand what authors’ experiences have been. I was surprised at the ease of the process and, once the book is available, how quickly changes can be made. The experience has given [...]
I recently read David Markson’s THIS IS NOT A NOVEL and am still digesting it. It is a piece of experimental fiction and it a real page turner, which I found remarkable given it’s format. The story, and I call it a story because there is a trajectory; the reader at the end is in [...]
A little while ago I posted about having read J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting For the Barbarians. The books has stuck with me mainly for its minimalism and the depth of character it portrays. The magistrate depicted is real enough to hang some clothes on, but at the same time dramatic so that he is not [...]
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