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 [...]
Last week, Meaghan O’Rourke began a series of essays on grief at Slate Magazine. I adore the essay form, and am especially moved by these pieces. O’Rourke, a poet and the culture critic at Slate, finds a place for both her lyric talent and her critic’s eye in these essays, which exquisitely balance personal pain [...]
I’m a sucker for books on writing, so I’ve read lots of them–the good, the bad and the stupid. As a mental exercise I decided to pick the few I’d have to buy again if they were all lost. Here are my picks for must-have books on the craft of writing:
The Elements of Style, by [...]
… an essay without a bit of both abstract reflection and winning anecdote–without a tear to raise and a point to score, without an unimpeded argument and an obvious “I”–isn’t quite an essay. The ideal essay has facts and feelings, emotions and thoughts, an argument about and an anecdote from, parallel and then crisscrossing, all [...]
For a writer rushing to the defense of entertainment (”…I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period.”), Michael Chabon doesn’t seem remotely interested in entertaining readers with his essay collection Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (McSweeney Books, 2008).
One of the great joys of Chabon’s fiction is narrative voice, a [...]