Take the Bait

I had started David Albahari’s Bait sometime last summer and finally finished it yesterday afternoon on the subway. As I had about five more stops to go, what else could I do but start reading from the beginning of the story again? It’s only a slim 117 pages, but I kept putting it down because the [...]

“Weeds”

It’s not that the books are checked out. They’re just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.
Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked [...]

“Standards”

A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short. It is from reading, even before writing, that I became part of a community—the community of literature—which includes more dead than living writers.
—Susan [...]

“Autobiography”

In an autobiography one cannot avoid writing “often” where truth would require that “once” be written. For one always remains conscious that the word “once” explodes that darkness on which the memory draws; and though it is not altogether spared by the word “often,” either, it is at least preserved in the opinion of the [...]

More first sentences

. . . on my Shelf from Italo Calvino, Eileen Chang, Julien Gracq, Franz Kafka, Lautréamont, Alberto Manguel, Albert Sánchez Piñol, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Enjoy, read and write well, and see you in the new year.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is [...]

Reading my professor; or, Searching for that literary mentor

One of the things I heard over and over in my MFA program was: Read your professor. Then you’ll know what kind of reader is reading your work, and only then can you respond correctly and meaningfully to his or her criticism.
This seems obvious; I might also disagree just a little bit. But I didn’t [...]

Too loud a solitude, indeed

A brief explanation for the name of this blog: I’ve been reading short novels lately, many of them by Eastern European writers such as David Albahari, a Serbian living in Canada in self-exile, and these days the late Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, on whom you can find comprehensive coverage in James Wood’s 2001 overview and [...]