It turned out that, indeed, there was another area of the exhibit that had more publishers of literary fiction than the area I’d previously visited.By the end of the day I had a bag full of so many goodies I had to ship them home.First, I stopped (again) by Europa Editions’s table because I’d been told that they would give books away.I had the unexpected luck of meeting the publisher himself, Kent Caroll, who let me choose two novels.I picked The...
The other day a young woman asked me what I did for a living. What an interesting question. If I had to live off the money I make from writing, I'd be living in a garden shed. On the other hand, it is through writing that I live. So, in a very real sense, when I answer that question by saying, "I write for a living" I am telling a far deeper truth.
Then I asked her if she was a reader. "Oh, yes," she replied.
"And what sort of books do you like?"
"I love James Patterson. His books are great."
"Are they?" I asked.
"Just great. So entertaining. I don't have to think about anything when...
At the 92nd Street YM-YWHA on Friday, the novelist and essayist Shirley Hazzardengaged the novelist Richard Ford in a conversation about reading and writing that was so warm, and literate, and amusing, and inspiring that it provoked something I don’t often encounter at literary events: a standing ovation. At her entrance, Ms Hazzard supported herself with a cane, but as she limped nobly to her chair, she brought us into her fold. “Excuse me,” she said, turning our way before she was even seated. “I’ve got a game leg.” That is, she was bonding with her audience at 60 m.p.h., even before Mr. Ford—who walked out with the assured gait of Clint Eastwood—could get a word in edgewise. Now, Mr. Ford is...
I can’t attend a literary evening without recalling Elizabeth Hardwick’s comment that the only thing she ever learned from a poetry reading concerned the physical condition of the poet at the time of the event. No poets read last night at Gilder Lehrman Hall in the Morgan Library—perhaps the most elegant and well-designed mid-sized auditorium in the New York—but I can report that each of the speakers appeared to be in good condition.
The evening was co-sponsored by New York Review Classics which is publishing editions of short stories by writers whose work is, in one way or other, haunted by New York. The panel was drawn from the writers who have edited the NYRB Classics editions: Colm Tóibín on Henry James, Roxana Robinson on...
Thursday evening PEN World Voices spread out. As I sat in the front section of the Morgan Library auditorium, I knew there were whirlwinds of words circling over Manhattan and at least one other borough.
Editing. If you're like me, it's a more pleasurable part of the writing life than facing that blank page every morning, but it's not without it's agonies.
‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’
- Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944. On the Art of Writing. 1916.
And therein lies the difference between that first free-wheeling tatterdemalion draft, and a polished ready-to-submit manuscript.
Many years ago, when I turned in my first novel, my editor at Harper Collins sent...
It is officially Midsummer, which means that I am becoming officially depressed. Or perhaps I will. I can't say yet. It's something I am fighting as I learn that summer does not have to be the "end" of something but that rather, it can be a beginning. Any ending is also likewise a beginning. When we are awake, our waking life, is no less rich than our dream life. In fact, I could argue that my dream life is far more valuable and true than my waking life these days. My waking life is full of fact and work and sometimes hurt (miscommunications, the sort of thing that has you yearning and bending your ear to Glenn Campbell's Wichita Lineman, a song I have always...
Michael has a stand of high chairs with foot-rests all built upon a sturdy oak wooden frame with arm-rests. He is a shoe-shine guy. He is standing under the shelter of the overhang of Grand Central Station on 42nd and Lex. in front of his shoe-shine booth. This makes sense - a good place for a booth - for it provides shelter for anyone who wants to get their shoes shined even while it's raining out, so the weather has no affect on Michael's business.
I'm standing outside of the Grand Central, waiting to meet my friend M. I have on a silk dress, flat ballerina flats (Michael notes that they are patent leather - "nice," he says. "Shiny."), and...
It’s hot. Very hot. Too hot to be walking the thirty or so blocks to SONY BMG where I have a meeting, and then the twenty or so blocks back and on another avenue where I am to meet a friend. It is the ultimate New York City summer day and I feel like I am about to pass out either from a general headiness from the many good things at present (professional, personal), the fact that I am fully in love and landed on that square without even trying or wanting, that I am giddy already and with reason, or perhaps it is just the oh-so-humid day, the sun beating down (beating down), and that no matter...
Tennessee Williams said, “There is a time in life for departure even when there is no place to go.”
It’s a slippery statement but at this juncture, I can relate in that I feel a need for departure – be it from a relationship or place – it is a departure all the same. The scary thing about departure is that you don’t know where it leads, as Williams says. You know where you were, or you think you know here you were or perhaps you did and now it has been changed, dare I say edited, revised, history rewritten? This happens: people can be conveniently revisionist when it suits, and this hurts. They will take years of a shared history and with one mark of...
