No way to live like this
My friend Bay Lettique, a sleight-of-hand man, does close-up magic. You can shuffle a deck of playing cards, spread them facedown on the table, and he’ll pick them up in order, ace to king, by suit or by rank, your choice. He once asked me to think of a card – not to mention it,...
Sow the weeds
These are my best tips for writing non-fiction. I haven’t the faintest idea how one approaches novels or stories, and the below is probably terrible advice for fiction writers, who just seem to need a lot of time. 1. Writing is a job The worst thing you can do for your writing is get precious...
Unknown knowns
When I began writing my story collection The UnAmericans I was blissfully ignorant of all things publishing-related. I’d never considered the difference between a commercial or independent press, or publishing stories in magazines versus small journals – reading was, at that time in my life, a completely personal and haphazard experience. I’d wander into a...
By kingmaker’s cunning
We all have difficult friendships. While our friendships can be sources of sustenance and joy, they can also be full of petty jealousies, professional rivalries, and personal slights real or perceived. One such difficult friendship is at the centre of my new novel, a historical thriller set in late medieval England. The friends? Geoffrey Chaucer,...
Waking up to Middlemarch
Pamela Erens’ new novel The Virgins is an unflinchingly unsettling fresh take on the traditions of the boarding-school novel, in which a repentant narrator looks back on his past actions as a titillated but embittered bystander observing and provoking the crumbling relationship of a co-ed academy’s golden couple. Where are you now? Sitting at my...
Between Nabokov and Fleming
Read more and buy the book David Gilbert’s archly entertaining and insightful novel & Sons, about a once-lauded novelist reaching out to his estranged family, was published in the US to rave reviews that variously compared his storytelling, mastery of language and observational skills to Dostoyevsky, Ford Madox Ford, Proust and Nabokov. As the book...
Conspiracy
It is all carefully arranged. Everything is arranged. It is arranged that men should be broken and that they should be mended. Just as you send your clothes to the laundry and mend them when they come back, so we send our men to the trenches and mend them when they come back again. You...
Amy Tan among the courtesans
Amy Tan’s latest novel, The Valley of Amazement, is a sweeping saga spanning fifty years and two continents, at its heart examining the inner workings of Shanghai’s courtesan houses in the aftermath of the collapse of China’s imperial dynasty when the New Republic opened the gates to international trade – and universal chicanery. In territory...
Joyce Carol Oates: ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’
Anyone who doubts a short story’s capacity to pack a powerful punch hasn’t yet read the much anthologised and analysed short story by Joyce Carol Oates ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’. Set in the mid-1960s, it is a tale that can be read as a crime story, an allegory, a snapshot of...
Suzanne Berne behind the picket fence
Suzanne Berne won the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction with her debut, A Crime in the Neighborhood, the shocking story of a young boy’s molestation and murder in a Washington suburb in the 1970s. With her latest novel, The Dogs of Littlefield, she’s back in the suburbs again, this time in Massachusetts. A poised study...
Raymond Carver: ‘Cathedral’
“I knew that story was different from anything I’d ever written… and all of the stories after that seemed to be fuller somehow and much more generous and maybe more affirmative… Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to move toward. And I moved. And quickly.” This is Raymond Carver and he is referring...
Lorrie Moore: ‘Community Life’
As with most anything in life, from parents to food to clothes, I’d had plenty of experience with short stories before I really knew what they were. We read them in school (another thing experienced before it’s understood): these one- to forty-page things of fiction, usually in a photocopied packet, or an anthology containing other...
