Despite some fifty years now of “experimental fiction,” the majority of current novels I’ve read still aim for the Roman arch structure—but fail miserably. I’m mostly thinking of books in the “blockbuster midlist” category, like Jonathan Franzen’s works. Like the painstaking ratchet of roller coaster cars up the incline, these novels develop complex action and character so meticulously that they are forced to cut loose in the final third, the cars careening downhill in the kin...| Slant Books
Below I give you the first paragraph of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral —a book that creates its main character and its theme only to undermine both. The paragraph is a gift to a close reader because it enacts all this creating and undermining within just its own short compass. Conceivably, you could savor just this paragraph, claim you’d read the whole book, and walk away with a good conscience.| Slant Books
I've been reading Mojtabai ever since, as her slim and potent novels have appeared at intervals over the years. Even if we concede that every interesting writer is in a sense sui generis, Mojtabai has had a career that distinguishes her as one who follows her own path. In some respects, she could be said to have had an anti-career, as stubbornly resistant to literary fashion as to the imperatives of the marketplace.| Slant Books
William James said belief is what we actually attend to, as opposed to what we simply profess. On those terms, I must be the world’s most devout follower of Cees Nooteboom’s novel Rituals (1980), which I read again recently on a long flight home. I’m haunted by these languid, philosophical pages. I keep going back to try to understand the haunting.| Slant Books
Ernest Hemingway said he wrote on “the principle of the iceberg”—1/8th above the surface, 7/8th below. For him, less is more, the meanings more powerful because they’re not stated, but implied. That’s why Hemingway has been praised for his art of omission, knowing what to leave out. It’s why the novelist Anthony Burgess honored him for teaching writers “how to use the silences between words.”| Slant Books
One day for reasons unknown I was struck with this image of a boy riding with his father along a back country road. When I put myself in that boy’s shoes, I couldn’t help but see from the perspective of my own boyhood, which put them in North Carolina, and made the boy’s father a Vietnam combat veteran—someone big, powerful, and dangerous, as my stepfather was (or at least that’s how I saw him at the time).| Slant Books
In July 2024, Pope Francis issued an extraordinary 5000-word Pastoral Letter titled “On the Role of Literature in Formation.” At first, he says, he’d thought of addressing it to people engaged in pastoral work, including of course priests; but then he realized that his audience should be all Christians—because his subject was “the value of reading novels and poems as part of one’s path to personal maturity.”| Slant Books
2024 marks the fortieth anniversary since the publication of the novel Bright Lights, Big City. It was the first book by Jay McInerney, and probably to his chagrin, the one for which he is still known the most. If you know anything about it at all, you probably remember the novel’s signature reference to cocaine as “Bolivian Marching Powder,” in which the twenty-something male protagonist, in the middle of an emotional breakdown, indulges on a parade of mirrors and in nightclub bathrooms.| Slant Books
In The New Yorker’s May 27, 2024, issue, Kathryn Schulz has a fascinating article called “Wait For It: Suspense in Literature and Life.” Her thesis is that every kind of literature—not just murder mysteries—is full of suspense. “In fact, outside of phone books and instruction manuals, it’s almost impossible to find a written work that doesn’t make use of suspense to captivate its readers.| Slant Books
I think moments from my own life always find their way into my fiction, but certainly this novel and my earlier short stories blend both personal experience and invention. That’s typical for most writers I know and have read about. The narrator, Joe, began as a character similar to me, but so did his girlfriend Ashley. I suppose they both mirror basic aspects of my life.| Slant Books
This list is based partly on some reading I’ve been doing for a novel project now drawing near completion. Two themes govern the list. The more fun theme is that of adventure, romance, epic, enchantment—in a word, fantasy. The equally profound and urgent, if less obviously exciting theme, is that of georgics or the literary tradition that celebrates the cultivation of the earth, as well as its beauty and mystery and terror.| Slant Books
The most amazing thing happened to me in the past few weeks. It was the kind of thing that I thought might never happen to me in exactly the same way, ever again: I fell in love with a book. The book was a novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha, originally published in 2020.| Slant Books
I pick books that I know exhibit a strong sense of place, and sometimes I choose to read something because I know it has to do with a certain city, country, region, climate, or landform. Recently I’ve been reading some literature that I’ve selected for what I can only call—to borrow a concept from quantum mechanics—its geopoetic entanglement. As I work on writing a novel set in the region of the upper Great Lakes, I’ve been looking to read literature set in a similar region.| Slant Books
Among my go-to examples of narrative efficiency is Isak Dinesen’s short story/novella, “Babette’s Feast,” more familiar to many through Gabriel Axel’s 1987 Danish language film adaptation, which is as economical in storytelling as its source. Not an image or action in the film is wasted, while Dinesen's story is the Platonic form of Strunk and White's Rule #17: Omit Needless Words.| Slant Books
More and more, I think, it’s this tyranny of concepts—the predetermination, pre-editing, and pre-thinking—that seem to plague our literature. Instead of opening the trap door to endless perspectives, endless transfiguration, this book, along with so many, seemed to end where it started.| Slant Books
I started writing “There Will Never Be Another Night Like This” because I was trying to remember the feeling of being very young, bold, romantic, and sort of benignly self-centered. Remember those days? A story began to emerge around this feeling. Some of the places and people and events are based on real life—the drive-in theater, for example—but the predominant autobiographical link is that sense of invincibility that Nils is enjoying, but which even he seems to realize is fleeting.| Slant Books
Jon Fosse’s novel Septology (published in Norwegian in 2019) is a monologue beginning and ending in the mind of Asle, an elderly widowed Norwegian painter living in the countryside on the proceeds from the sale of his paintings. He communes throughout the next 667 pages with a self who becomes both him and not him.| Slant Books
