“I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart,’” Alice Munro, the new winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, once told the New Yorker. When Munro (1931) was growing up in Depression-era Canada, she learned not to believe she was […]
Read More ...Articles
Atwood in Amsterdam
On September 4 I moderated a reading with one of the writers I admire and love most, Margaret Atwood, for the John Adams Institute in De Duif in Amsterdam. There’s no recording of our conversation, but she read one of my favorite parts of MaddAddam, the story of Zeb and the bear, and you […]
Read More ...Toni Morrison Rewrites “Othello”
For someone who can be so fierce in her fiction, Toni Morrison is remarkably easy to talk to. A conversation on the phone with her, at the house on the Hudson River where she’s lived for years, is warm, fun even—if you’re allowed to say that about a Nobel Prize-winning author. She tells stories. She heaps praise…
Read More ...A Woman Walking: “Mrs. Dalloway”
There’s a pleasure in any place that comes purely from knowing it well. In the country, the feeling is often a private one: that tree, that field, that view seems to belong to you alone. In the city the same sentiment has a competitive, even arrogant edge. To claim a city’s heart—especially if you’re a writer—you have to insist that no one sees it more clearly or takes more joy in it than you.
That’s why literature is so full of solitary walkers…
Winterson: Why Be Happy…
This year’s Village Voice pick. I’d already written about the Le Guin collected stories and Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue,” so I chose Jeanette Winterson’s memoir “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” I heard her read the other day and was moved by her account of writing her way out of depression. Depression was like […]
Read More ...Ursula K. Le Guin, American Novelist
It’s been fifty years since Ursula K. Le Guin sold her first short story. Since then her books have been read, taught, quoted, thrust upon acquaintances, put at the top of Occupy reading lists. Over the course of a long, unpredictable, idiosyncratic career, she has written contemporary fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and essays. But she […]
Read More ...Predicting the Nobel 2012
Among the Nobel favorites, those weather-beaten figures on the liar’s bench of literature, two names turn up every year side by side: the Canadian writers Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Munro (1931), the Vermeer of the short story, is known for her unparalleled prose. Atwood (1939), always more political, has moved from sharp-edged explorations of […]
Read More ...Homesickness Is a Universal Condition: A Talk with Halil Gür
There’s a kind of traveler who arrives one day in a new place and knows that this is where he was meant to be. Some crave the rush of New York. Others discover their inner Italian. Still others, with more watery blood perhaps, take a tourist trip to Holland and find that they have come […]
Read More ...Michael Chabon: Telegraph Avenue
“Telegraph Avenue” is unquestionably a Great American Novel, but at first glance you might not recognize it as such. Michael Chabon braids plot twists, extraneous details, and references to such low-culture manifestations as comic books and kung fu movies into his stories with an almost adolescent abandon. In America a new Chabon book is a major event, but outside the English-speaking world, his verbal extravagance and fond embrace of popular culture…
Read More ...A Brief Talk with Patti Smith
Customers are lined up down the stairs and out the door of the American Book Center on the Spui in Amsterdam. A few of them are holding well-worn LPs. But most of them—especially the kids in their twenties—are carrying copies of “Just Kids,” the wildly successful, award-winning memoir by the punk singer Patti Smith. On […]
Read More ...