Berg, The Weird, and The Eerie
Ann Quin’s debut novel takes aim at the difficulties of daily life, bringing to light our lack of control and the need for introspection when faced with even the simplest of questions.
W. G. Sebald
On Movement: the Writer as Walker
Many writers have explored the pleasures of walking, including the likes of Virginia Woolf and Amy Hempel. There is a whole canon that depicts and analyzes the connection between moving through geographical terrains and mental ones.
Postcards from Unexpected Places
Like long handwritten letters and atlases, postcards descend from another world now deemed impractical. They belong to the world of Denis Breen in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Loyal Blood and his travels across the American West in Annie Proulx’s Postcards. Ruth, in Lorrie Moore’s story “Real Estate,” finds the form “so careless and cheap.” The…
Writing the Mind: Nicole Krauss, W.G. Sebald, & Paul Harding
How does one apply the adage show don’t tell to the interior of the mind—a vast expanse one inhabits daily, but never sees? While Pixar’s Inside Out turns the subconscious into a playful and sometimes dark adventure, literature must rely on language—pacing, syntax, and form matching function. In the early pages of Nicole Krauss’s novel Great…
A Year Spent Reading 100 Books
I write New Year’s resolutions every year, though I really ought to know better. Run every day, floss regularly, stop eating donuts: it’s the stuff of fantasy. In 2014 I spared myself the usual set-ups for failure in favor of a more exotic set-up for failure: I resolved to read one hundred books. It was…