It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
It’s an opening that’s been quoted many times, and with good reason. This opening sets a tone for the narrator, goes directly to theme and introduces the plot that’s about [...]
In every recession, magazines we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on the newsstand close their doors forever, victims of the slump in advertising dollars that invariably comes during tough economic times. So with last week’s news of Blender’s demise, just the most recent in a string of magazines that have folded since the economic crisis began, [...]
I’ve been giving some thought to genre since I started work on a new novel in February. And as I looked at Elaura Niles’ Some Writers Deserve to Starve (Writer’s Digest Books, 2005), I wondered what genre some of my favorite novels are in, at least in the minds of booksellers, librarians and reviewers. I’ve [...]
The book isn’t new, but it’s a useful, easy read for anyone who wants to get their writing into print: Some Writers Deserve to Starve: 31 Brutal Truths About the Publishing Industry (by Elaura Niles, Writers Digest Books, 2005).
Some of the information, especially about the ever-changing electronic world, is already a little bit out of [...]
I haven’t read the novel he’s most famous for, Infinite Jest (Little, Brown & Co.), but I’ve read many of his essays, and enjoy them tremendously. What I enjoy most is highlighted in this video clip–the humor of reality. He reads from essays on the Illinois State Fair and a cruise, and they are funny [...]
I’m a huge Dickens fan, and enjoyed Matthew Pearl’s article at Slate magazine on whether the author had a stalker during his 1867 speaking tour of the U.S. Also at Slate this week, more of Meghan O’Rourke’s elegantly written series on grieving, The Long Goodbye. This week’s essay discusses dreaming of the dead, and the [...]
On Tuesday, we had a preview of spring, with temperatures reaching a balmy 75 degrees in my little corner of Wisconsin. That’s a rare treat in March.
And though today’s high is only supposed to reach 40 degrees, there are enough markers of the coming change of season to make me feel like it is almost [...]
I’ve been quiet for a few days, and with good reason. I worked on the backstage crew of a show that ran last weekend, and the hours were crazy. So yesterday morning, I knew I had my work cut out for me. I had a deadline: 20 pages of my novel due at noon to [...]
Slate Magazine has some excellent book coverage this week, including Katha Pollitt’s review of Elaine Schowalter’s new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to to Annie Proulx (Knopf Publishing Group), and Nathan Heller’s take on the new John Cheever biography, Cheever: A Life (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group), by Blake [...]
I’ve puzzled over memoir ever since, when my youngest went to kindergarten, my mother asked me if I was “going back to work.” When I told her I was going to write fulltime, her eyes welled with tears. “You aren’t going to write autobiography, are you?” she almost begged.
You would think I’d had a horrible [...]