The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Narrative as the Pillar of Identity – Brain Pickings

The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Narrative as the Pillar of Identity – Brain Pickings The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Narrative as the Pillar of Identity "Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique." By Maria Popova "A person’s identity," Amin Maalouf wrote in his brilliant treatise on personhood, "is like a pattern ...

Structural Play: 8 Books That Challenge Genre and Style

My novel Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, out now from Feminist Press, is a coming-of-age novel in which the styles and modes seem to grow up (or refuse to) with its protagonist. The former head detective of a juvenile friend-group series modeled after The Baby-Sitters Club (crossed with Nancy Drew and Goosebumps), Margaret has aged out of this genre and "graduated" to a young adult problem novel. Her path includes adventures in queer body horror and an escape to the realm of aut...

Carson McCullers

Early Life A renowned American Novelist, playwright, and essayist, Carson McCullers, was born on the 19th of February in 1917 in Georgia, the United States. She was a precocious daughter of Lamar Smith, a jeweler by profession, while her mother, Marguerite Waters, was a homemaker. Carson shared the aesthetic and unique creative abilities of her parents from a very young age; she took piano lessons when she was five. Later, after recognizing her unique writing abilities, her father gifted C...

The Secret of Poetry

When Geoffrey Hill began his fourth lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2011, the audience members clearly expected a mischievous performance. In his first lecture, Hill had promised a future evaluation of contemporary British poetry, and in the subsequent oration he did not hold back, appraising creative writing as a neoliberal efflorescence of a doomed literary culture, with its ‘plethora of literary prizes’ and false evaluation of its own health. Anti-élitist ‘accessibility’ was the b...

You’re Food and Drink to Me - A Letter From Henry Miller to Anais Nin

In 1932, months after first meeting in Paris and despite both being married, celebrated Cuban diarist Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller—the hugely influential novelist responsible for writing the sexually explicit  (for  the times) novel Tropic of Cancer (1934), which Nin helped to finance—began a fiery love affair. The liaison would last for many years, a situation further  intensified by the fact that Nin also had an openly discussed affair, albeit brief, with Miller’s then-wife, June, as their ow...

The Painful Cost of the Writing Life

At the time of my first novel’s death, I had written fewer than twenty new pages, best characterized as a project rather than a novel. I was twenty-​nine years old, hardly ancient, but I had been writing fiction since I was sixteen. Thirteen years is either a lot of time to throw away to pursue a new career, or a lot of time to be doing something and not yet know what you’re doing. I was haunted by the voice of an award-​winning writer in graduate school who described one of my short stori...

Open for Business - novel openings

Thumbing through a bunch of novels--all varieties--it surprises me at how few know how to make the narrative interesting. They must be decent books. Someone took time to hone it and probably inflicted it on friends and mentors to read. And later, an editor bought it and--one would think--helped hone it further so that you have something interesting happening in the first two pages. Something. I'm not asking for a gunfight or a verbal one, but maybe. Something. This scene from Together is amaz...

The Power and Perils of Storytelling: How We Make Narratives Out of Predatory Relationships

"My body was made of paper, ink flowed through my veins, my organs didn’t exist. I was a fiction." Consent, Vanessa Springora * "As always, the truth is slipping further out of reach with every word he says." The Comeback, Ella Berman * "An older man using a girl to feel better about himself—how easily the story becomes a cliché" the narrator of My Dark Vanessa states near the end of Kate Elizabeth Russell’s novel, encapsulating a central problem that seems to exist for tho...

Against the Literature of Silence: Richard Flanagan on the Writer’s Freedom to Embrace Heresy

It is strange to have as my subject freedom to write coming from an island which, for a quarter of its modern history, was a slave society. Though there were major differences, the literature of the era abounds with comparisons between the convict society of Van Diemen’s Land and the slave societies of the Americas. My forebears were transported as convicts from Ireland, frequently in the same ships and similar conditions to those which had transported Africans into American slavery, now p...

The Handle on the Door to a New World: Poet Jane Hirshfield on the Magic and Power of Metaphor, Animated

"A metaphor is language that simultaneously creates and solves its own riddle; within that minute explosion of mind is both expansion and release… It is how the mind instructs itself in a more complex seeing." It is a marvel, though hardly a surprise, that children’s minds are machines for metaphor. We are meaning-making creatures — from the moment we begin trying to make sense of the world, and even as we face the terrifying prospect of its meaninglessness, the familiar becomes our...

Maidens - A Novel set in London

JW Dunne - a remarkable conception of time

The Address Book

The Address Book date Jan 10, 2021 Attachments Download PDF Scanned by your friends at Shoeboxed

Novel in Progress - Poem

From Believer Magazine Summer 2021 Print Edition:

Five Ways to Include Dreams in Your Plot

Dream and Fly by •ღ Anita ღ• used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Writing dreams allows us to discard the last vestiges of reality and embrace wild surrealism, paint colorful metaphors, or explore the inner workings of our characters. Unfortunately, standard-issue dreams come with a problem: they don’t matter. Without impacting future events, they’ll feel like a tangent or a cheap route to excitement. Thankfully, we can change that, especially in speculative fiction. Let’s look at five w...

What Is Isolated Can Be Seen Better

A taste for aphorism comes with age. It’s a matter of patience. Careful readers, as we get older, lose tolerance for clumsy verbiage. Time is short. A well-crafted aphorism, a mere handful of words, contains more thought-matter than most novels. I choose "matter" purposely. A good aphorism seems to confirm Einstein’s notion that matter isenergy. I think of aphorisms lying on the page, coiled to strike when released by the reader. There’s often a casual stridency about aphorisms that offends s...

Kinds of writing (guest post by Kwame Anthony Appiah)

This is a guest post by Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) on reading and writing fiction, for a series of blogposts we are hosting on philosophers who write fiction or poetry (see here for an earlier installment).My mother was an artist who became a writer because she found that it was easier, while raising children, to compose fiction than to paint. (A brief teenage conversation with my mother: "Mummy, why did you stop painting?" "You were born." Guilty silence.) The first draft of ...

Tim Parks: Have you seen my hand?

‘Look both ways when you cross the street,’ Giovanni’s mother tells him when he goes out. He’s a careless boy, easily distracted, and the reader is primed. In the street, the boy is ‘so pleased with how careful he’s being that he starts hopping along like a sparrow’. A polite gentleman warns him that this is carelessness indeed: ‘You see? You’ve already lost a hand.’ Looking for his hand, Giovanni’s attention is absorbed by a tin can, then a limping dog. He doesn’t even notice he’s lost ‘a wh...

Soiled, Torn, Dead

Soiled, Torn, Dead Chapter 7, Part II, of Lolita is an extraordinarily powerful piece of writing, even by the standards of that work. This is the chapter that begins: "I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals". In this chapter Humbert Humbert describes how the twelve-year-old Dolores Haze was turned into a prostitute by his demands on her. Her allowance was granted only on condition that she consents to his sexual requests.He reports: "Only very...

Professional Brochure Copywriter Matthew Brennan

Professional Brochure CopywriterTell a Compelling Story About Your Business A professional brochure copywriter can help you create a valuable marketing piece for your company. While your website may be your main marketing hub, print collateral pieces can play a significant role in helping your business sell more. Brochures are a perfect way to engage with a potential customer offline. In order to succeed and have an impact, brochures should be more than a fancy design with a few stale paragr...

Harry You Must Stop Living in the Past - Names as Acts of Recall in John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom

Punning of Reason - TLS

Excerpted from Uncommon Law

Uncanny Elizabethan Autofiction

Autofiction in the new novel Kraft