Recently, from the comfort of my writing studio, I had the opportunity to read from my new book Q&A for a community of my peers during the alumni reunion of the Pan European MFA Program. One advantage of the virtual format for such a reading is the ease of incorporating visuals (including video!). It was a pleasure to trot this new novel out and to feel it getting a bit of wind in its mane after long days in the barn. Here's video evidence of the fact that I, for one, enjoyed the experience:
Enthralled by the screen, we came to question the necessity of privacy. We learned to let go of old values, and to require speed, convenience, portability, connectivity. We learned to desire our stats and the stats of others. We learned to accept the special way the screen reduced to equivalencies all things seen within its frame: NASCAR, cop shows, TV journalism, late night comedians, cat GIFS, and the office of the presidency. Gone was the idea of everything in its proper place.
More screen, less “meatspace” and IRL. More optimization, less serendipity. More jump-cuts, less syntax. More data, data, data. More info, info, info.
We embraced the self-promoting capacities and tools the screen promised us. We learned to expect an audience. We honed the skill of performing our lives in lieu of merely living them.
The screen created the “sharing economy,” the “attention economy,” the “gig economy,” and a special iteration of the “creative class” — a brave new world in which it seemed that everybody’s individual passion had, at long last, converged with their livelihood, while in fact hardly anybody was making a living anymore.
The screen provided us 2,000 songs in the palm of the hand but dealt a fatal blow to the solvency of musicians. The screen provided the texts of 3,500 books at a weight of 9.5 ounces but contributed to the dissolution of publishers and booksellers and weakened the infrastructure that supported and sustained authors. The screen empowered and accelerated the mobilization of righteous movements: the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street and the Million Women March and Black Lives Matter, but it exposed us as never before to the rapacity of advertisers, to the invasive scrutiny of our own government agencies under the PATRIOT Act, to a massive blurring of private and professional life, to the political meddling of extra-national bots, to the daily specter of harassment by anonymous trolls, and to amplified terrorist threats both international and domestic.
Our fixation on the screen forged new neural networks and sharpened into biochemical habit our reluctance toward the printed page, our acceptance of incoherent audio-visual stimuli, and our need to fictionalize our lives not only for others but publicly for ourselves.
The screen led us away from the book toward the illumined mirage, away from ideas toward memes.
The screen gave us new meanings: desktop, window, home, field, friend.
It redefined everything.
Now, here in the madding wake of the 45th American presidency, let us remember that once upon a time we impeached the screen. TV itself was made to stand trial before the U.S. Congress. The memories are hazy, the details obscured as if behind a veil of snowy static, but this happened.
America, a land of electronic images, big pharma, high-tech distraction, and endless advertising, seemed to be teetering on the cusp of an awful new reality. False impressions were the stock in trade, big onscreen metrics mattered most, and in the midst of this a white man played a version of himself on primetime. He was a celebrity and a winner, and he ruled the ratings.
The object of this man’s game was to claim knowledge he didn’t possess, and to provide an image viewers would anxiously fixate upon and maybe even idolize.
He was a man more closely watched than any person of any time before him. He became TV and TV became him.
M. Allen Cunningham's new book Q&A is out now from Regal House Publishing. A virtual event with Cunningham, fellow author Steven Mayfield (Treasure of the Blue Whale), and Regal House editor Pam Van Dyk helped to mark the book's launch.
Matters discussed included: building fiction inspired by real events; novels as pleasure; televisual media and its long-term impact on culture; truth versus entertainment; where characters come from; the novel as yarn or tall-tale; outlines and endings; crafting voice in fiction; typewriters (!).
Kenyon Saint Claire is the son of a distinguished literary family, a keeper and teacher of the written word, but his America is a land of electronic images, big pharma, high-tech distraction, and endless advertising. False impressions are the stock in trade, and big metrics matter, especially onscreeen. That’s where Kenyon finds himself, isolated behind glass, portraying a televised version of himself on a scripted game show, avoiding the devouring eye of the camera that feeds his image to fifteen million viewers. The year is 1956.
Inspired by true events, groundbreaking in its evocation of an agitated, media-soaked half century, M. Allen Cunningham’s Q&A urgently reimagines the misunderstood 1950s quiz show scandals in light of our own time, as a moment of cultural reckoning whose reverberations we feel all around us today: in reality television, TV politics, the triumph of incoherence, and the pandemic problem of how to be real in a world of screen-induced self-deception.
Praise for M. Allen Cunningham
“A fully formed, timeless American writer.”
—Square Books, Oxford MS
“One of the bravest and most talented novelists writing today.”
—Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child, Pulitzer Prize Finalist
“A master storyteller.”
—Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
“Cunningham’s prose is perfect—he writes dialogue and sentences that beg to be read aloud.”
In this whimsical, often funny, Depression-era tale, young Connor O’Halloran decides to share a treasure he’s discovered on an isolated stretch of Northern California beach. Almost overnight, his sleepy seaside village is comically transformed into a bastion of consumerism, home to a commode with a jeweled seat cover, a pair of genuinely fake rare documents, a mail-order bride, and an organ-grinder’s monkey named Mr. Sprinkles. But when it turns out that the treasure is not real, Connor must conspire with Miss Lizzie Fryberg and a handful of town leaders he’s dubbed The Ambergrisians to save their friends and neighbors from financial ruin. Along the way, he discovers other treasures in the sometimes languid, sometimes exciting days of that long-ago season. He is rich and then he isn’t. He learns to sail a boat and about sex. He meets a real actor. He sneaks into villainous Cyrus Dinkle’s house and steals his letter opener. He almost goes to jail. He loves Fiona Littleleaf. He finds a father. And best of all, he and little brother, Alex, reclaim their mother from the darkness of mental illness.
Praise for Treasure of the Blue Whale
Steven Mayfield crafts this well-conceived plot into a coming-of-age fable that is full of mystery, heroism, familial love, and humanity. It’s a genuine, imaginative, and endearing meditation on how a few good people working together can accomplish so much in a weary world.
“Readers looking for a slightly stylized yarn of small-town drama will find much to enjoy in this charming book. A whale of a tale concerning a boy who tries to lift everyone’s spirits”
Revisit some prophetic words from the great Edward R Murrow, which are featured in M. Allen Cunningham's Q&A, arriving in paperback and ebook in January 2021.
(For best viewing results, enlarge the video to full-screen.)
During this event at the fabled Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, Cunningham discusses his fourth novel PERPETUA'S KIN. A sweeping story of five generations in one American family, PERPETUA'S KIN spans much of North America, from the 1820s in Iowa to the American south during the Civil War to World War II San Francisco. In a structured presentation, Cunningham describes the story's origins, his research, the themes and characters, the influence of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and why this novel was 11 years in the making. He also reads short selections from the book. The event includes an audience Q&A. It was recorded on a rainy night in November 2018.
WHAT WOULD LEONARD COHEN DO? If you’re a hardworking creative soul striving to continue doing the work of the expressive imagination, striving to honor an authentic vision that resists the forces of market optimization, you could do a lot worse than immerse yourself in Leonard Cohen’s corpus and give that question your consideration.
Mentioned in this episode: Leonard Cohen; Cohen's "Hallelujah"; Songs of Leonard Cohen; Cohen's 1963 debut novel The Favorite Game; CBC Television; Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers; Cohen's performance style; Bob Dylan; Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat"; Zen; Mount Baldy; Leonard Cohen world tour; skipping at age 78; Cohen's album You Want It Darker; Cohen's album Thanks for the Dance; Feist; Beck; Damien Rice.
In this video excerpt from a talk I recently gave to a class of brilliant young writers, I describe the interdisciplinary relationship between Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (a relationship depicted in Lost Son, my novel about Rilke).
What can creative writers learn from what Rilke learned from Rodin?
The talk includes my own translation of Rilke's great poem "The Panther" (also found below).
The Panther
Rainer Maria Rilke
(transl. M. Allen Cunningham)
His gaze, from the passing bars,
has grown so weary that it can hold nothing more.
To him there are a thousand bars
and beyond the thousand bars no world at all.
The soft drop of his dread sleek steps,
conscribed to a tight circle,
is like a dance of stamina around a center
in which a greater will stands stunned.
Yet sometimes the curtain of the pupil stirs,
opens itself soundlessly -- then an image gets inside,
Cunningham's autobiographical essay, with musical accompaniment and slightly abridged.
"Variations on a Beginning" was originally published in complete form in The Timberline Review, Issue No. 3 (summer/fall 2016). You can read the full essay HERE.
For Henry David Thoreau's 203rd birthday, 12 July 2020: some choice excerpts from Canby's brilliant 1939 biography -- reminders about the growth and plight of genius.
"Overflowing with thoughts, he yet looked around for more, because he was living so intensely that his own thoughts choked his utterance. This description will do for any young writer. Thoreau's advantage lay in his resolve to find out what he was living before he made a book about it--to be, as he said to Emerson, first the idea itself.
[...]
"When a deep excitement of the mind finds a favorable environment, as it did in this Concord which was, indeed, a power plant of idealistic energy stepping up the spiritual voltage of the nineteenth century, an authentic moment in the history of civilization often follows.
[...]
"The two conditioning factors for writing anywhere, any time, are the quality of the imagination and the nature of the market. Later comes the fork of the road -- one way toward the competent and salable, the other toward the excellent and possibly unsalable. The completely successful [person] of letters is not [they] who writes for nothing, but rather the writer who learns how to do what [they] want -- and how to make readers pay for it. The predestined commercial writer is seldom a frustrated [person] of letters. [Their] success in cash returns is due to a different set of qualities. Every author writes for money, for money represents an audience, and no creative mind writes for itself alone. The question is, how high a price will [they] pay for the money [they] get. That became Thoreau's problem; but at first his concern was with what he had to say, and to whom and how he could say it. When this was solved, the question of how he was to get paid enough to allow him to go on writing followed, and in solving that in his own original fashion he broke out of obscurity into fame.
[...]
"The great world had no need of him, and he in his turn found that, for him, the greater world was Concord. And so, having been an author without pay, and having learned how to place an occasional manuscript with insufficient pay, he came home [from a brief residence away at Staten Island] to take up from a new angle his problem of how to live and how to stay alive while living. He had learned that in order to do what he wanted in writing he would have to publish himself. And this inevitably led him to Walden Pond.
[...]
"The failure of [Thoreau's first book] 'The Week' when it was first published, must be charged to the failure of the audience to whom he finally addressed it, much as, I think far more than, to its own defects in composition.
[...]
"These ecstasies in prose, those hours of observation, this hard labor with the pen and hard study of science and travel, now, rather than Latin, Greek, and the Hindu classics, this daily filling up of reservoirs, and nightly refining of waters, all this was Thoreau's real business of living while he was by trade the surveyor of Concord. Surveyor indeed, but not only of lot lines and corners!
[...]
"Thoreau lectures in Boston [1852] on his life at Walden, but to a handful only of people; the clerks at the other end of the reading-room would not put down their newspapers to listen, even when urged by [Bronson] Alcott."
From Thoreau by Henry Seidel Canby, 1939.
p.105
p.106
p.130
p.149
p.273
p.321
p.358
Have you heard my new podcast, Thoreau's Leaves?I started Thoreau's Leavespartly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, out of a wish to share with listeners, in a uniquely atmospheric and meditative form, the consolations and inspirations I find in my regular explorations of Thoreau's journal. Thoreau knew how to stay at home, and he was so adept at finding the universe in his own backyard. This is an exemplary practice that we all, staying at home as we are and ought to be, can benefit from right now, but it has an enduring relevance beyond these times as well. As a portrait of consciousness, of a mind awake and alert to the natural world, Thoreau's journal is unparalleled. Don your earphones, close your eyes, and see if you can muse again.
Virginia Woolf's magnificent Mrs. Dalloway was self-published 95 years ago today (May 14th) by Woolf's own Hogarth Press. Almost a century after its appearance this novel remains a profoundly strange and inspiring literary work -- still in many ways much bolder and more innovative than so many of our contemporary novels. In honor of the anniversary, I'm sharing my lecture on Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway given recently to my creative writing students at Portland State University. If you're a writer working against the grain of the times, you might find something here.
Episode 1: In the Absence of Yes Thoughts on a subject all too familiar to every writer: rejection. Believing in the worth of what you've produced is no easy thing. And deserving work is all too often passed over in sluice tides of manila envelopes. All that matters is what you're committed to. ---- In the Atelier, a new weekly podcast premiering January 2020, is a place for occasional thoughts on literature, writing, and the life of the imagination. Each artfully crafted episode brings you reflections and real talk about subjects like the nature of creativity, the highs and lows of making art, inspiring works of literature and cinema, and the value and valor of staying true to your own creative vision. Produced by the award-winning literary press Atelier26 Books and hosted by author, publisher, and teacher M. Allen Cunningham. Eager to hear more? Get exclusive early access to seven episodes with a tax-deductible donation to the Atelier26 Books 2020 Campaign. Mentioned in this episode: Wallace Stegner; New York Times; Henry James; Andre Dubus; Gustave Flaubert Music in this episode: "Door Knob" by Egon Stone; "Petrolchimica2" by Bottega Baltazar; "Rising Up" by OFRIN; "Seventh March" by C3NC (All music used by courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist)
A reading from Woolf's inimitable work. "I need not speak, but I listen. I am marvelously on the alert." Includes musical accompaniment from Bach's Cello Suite No. 6.
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"They want a plot, do they? They want a reason? It is not enough for them, this ordinary scene. It is not enough to wait for the thing to be said as if it were written; to see the sentence lay its dab of clay precisely on the right place, making character; to perceive, suddenly, some group in outline against the sky. Yet if they want violence, I have seen death and murder and suicide all in one room. One comes in, one goes out. There are sobs on the staircase. I have heard threads broken and knots tied and the quiet stitching of white cambric going on and on on the knees of a woman. Why ask, like Louis, for a reason, or fly like Rhoda to some far grove and part the leaves of the laurels and look for statues? They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines; the sun falls sheer into pools that are fledged with willows. (Here it is November; the poor hold out matchboxes in wind-bitten fingers.) They say truth is to be found there entire, and virtue, that shuffles along here, down blind alleys, is to be had there perfect. Rhoda flies with her neck outstretched and blind fanatic eyes, past us. Louis, now so opulent, goes to his attic window among the blistered roofs and gazes where she has vanished, but must sit down in his office among the typewriters and the telephone and work it all out for our instruction, for our regeneration, and the reform of an unborn world. "But now in this room, which I enter without knocking, things are said as if they had been written. I go to the bookcase. If I choose, I read half a page of anything. I need not speak. But I listen. I am marvelously on the alert. Certainly, one cannot read this poem without effort. The page is often corrupt and mud-stained, and torn and stuck together with faded leaves, with scraps of verbena or geranium. To read this poem one must have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster. One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders' delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drainpipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. The poet who has written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn. There are no commas or semicolons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer nonsense. One must be skeptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts. And so (while they talk) let down one's net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry." -p.131-2 Virginia Woolf self-published The Waves through The Hogarth Press, 1931
Our wide-ranging conversation touches on the day-to-day experiences of a New York editor, the role of luck in publishing, the value of mentors, what it's like to spend an hour discussing a single paragraph, the plight of "midlist" writers, and lots more.
"In any editing experience you have to make the art the most important consideration, even as you keep the artist’s personal feelings in mind while you’re doing that. This is why I feel so privileged. As the editor, I’m being invited into the workshop, where there’s sawdust on the floor and half-finished things. It’s a delicate space for the writer. You’re being trusted, and you need to acquit yourself well." -Ben George
Read the complete uncut version of the interview online HERE.
Artists and writers: At some point, or several points,
you’re going to receive the message that your work is insignificant, that your
commitment to the work is futile, that you and what you represent as an artist
do not matter.
At some point, or several points, you’re going to wonder
what use there is in continuing to do and share your work.
It’s unlikely that
you will escape this unpleasantness. But when it arrives, remember that almost nobody escapes it
— that you’ve come to a new threshold, and this one also you can cross as
you’ve crossed other thresholds before it.
Take the upleasantness as a sign of your progress, of the
strength of your commitment to the work. Take it as a reminder of how far
you’ve gone, and as a renewal.
Face the deafening silence, let outright
rejection wash over you. Then say to yourself, if you can, "Art is freedom,
beginnings are beautiful, rebeginnings even more so," and honor your practice
by showing up even when nobody else will — especially then.
You’re strong of heart, with fire in your belly, and
you’re endowed with gifts and disciplined in the daily work, the lifelong work,
of honing these gifts.
From the start you knew this work would be one of the
hardest things you could choose to do. Stand back and realize: there’s no
surprise in this turn of events. Don’t look around for those more “lucky” than
you.
Don’t review your prior hours and days in terms of “waste.” And don’t think in terms of “arrival,” only in terms of the
work at hand. Not “accomplishments,” only beginnings.
Give yourself, if
necessary, to posterity, or to your ancestors. Tell yourself the ages are
listening. Do what you have to do to reorient yourself.
Then: notice the light in your window, the shape of the
words inside you or already there on the paper, the instructions coming through
the music even on your thousandth listen.
Ready now, enclosed in frightful
privacy, get to work again, if not for yourself then for those of us you may
never meet. We’re full of faith in you and we are waiting.
Among teachers and critics and in the community of writers, we need more advocates for attunement to the sonic properties of prose. Joe Moran's recent essay on sentence-making consoles me (and probably also the underrated writers I most admire). I immediately printed it out for use with my creative writing students. Here's a prime passage, but follow the link at the end to read the whole.
"When the writer has a tin ear for the sound of a sentence then the reader knows, just as when she hears flat or pitchy singing, that something is wrong, even if she can’t quite say why.
I can let a book fall open and tell, just from reading a few sentences, if I will like it. However compelling the subject of a book might be, I find it hard to carry on reading if its sentences are boring. I should be more forgiving, since I have written my share of boring sentences. I am not. Neither are you, even if you don’t know it yet. You think you are looking past this sentence into what it is saying—about life, love, the existence of angels, the design of the injection-molded polypropylene stacking chair, whatever it is— but no. You think you care what this is about, but really you care how it sounds. You are reading it for its sentences."
As we roll toward the fall publishing season of "big" new books, big predestined bestsellers, the next big thing, etc., I would just like to say...
Here’s to the small books, the unsung writers, the unreviewed, the
unbought and unawarded, the authors and poets quietly refashioning form from
the margins and undaunted by the unlikeliness of success let alone a living.
Here’s to the denizens of the disappearing midlist and their beautiful
literary disappointments. Here’s to those at the bottom of the Bookscan barrel.
Here’s to the readers who write and who hope to write, the keepers of
commonplace books, the worried ones haunting their neighborhood independent and
holding out against Amazon.
Here’s to the editors standing sentinel for the living voice, who
circumvent or defy the deadening sales conference. Here’s to the individual
publishers carrying more than their weight in a march to keep the word alive,
even and especially where the profit potential is nil.
Here’s to the authors who help, especially the authors who have the
means or hold a megaphone and turn these to the work of encouraging,
supporting, and sustaining the less lucky.
Here’s to the writers who teach in order to instill creative freedom,
clarity of thought, a spirit of experimentation, & a fidelity to voice
& form however unconventional. Here’s to the small literary magazines &
the volunteers who produce them for the pure love of literature.
Here’s to the literary souls who staff our independent bookstores and
who, for every predestined bestseller, strive to lift up 10 small unlikely
works.
Here’s to the unnominated, the unconnected, the unincluded and
uninvited best of the best working without encouragement or reward. You’re
there, you’re for real, you keep us going.
John Steinbeck to his literary agent Elizabeth Otis, 1935:
"Curious that this second-rate book [Tortilla Flat], written for relaxation, should cause this fuss. In your dealings you need make no compromise at all for financial considerations as far as we are concerned. Too many people are trapped into promises by gaudy offers...we've gone through too damned much trying to keep the work honest and in a state of improvement to let it slip now in consideration of a little miserable popularity. I'm scared to death of popularity. It has ruined everyone I know...I suppose it is bad tactics but I am refusing the usual things--the radio talks, the autograph racket, the author's afternoons and the rest of the clutter--politely, I hope, but firmly."
Steinbeck to Joseph Henry Jackson, 1935. Upon learning that Tortilla Flat had won the gold metal for best novel from the Commonwealth Club of California, Steinbeck insisted that he could not attend the awards dinner:
"Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. The most I have had to dodge has been a literary tea or an invitation from a book shop to lecture and autograph. This is the first and God willing the last prize I shall ever win.
The whole early part of my life was poisoned with egotism, a reverse egotism, of course, beginning with self-consciousness. And then gradually I began to lose it.
In the last few books I have felt a curious richness as though my life had been multiplied through having been identified in a most real way with people who were not me. I have loved that. And I am afraid, terribly afraid, that if the bars ever go down, if I become a trade mark, I shall lose the ability to do that. When I do I shall stop working because it won't be fun anymore.
This is not clear, concise, objective thinking, but I have never been noted for any of those things. If I were a larger person I would be able to do this and come out of it untouched. But I am not...I have no social gifts and practically no social experience..."
To be in these rooms with this music in your ears is to sit for at least a few moments in Beethoven's mind and body. His music seems to grow more and more miraculous.
Portland area friends, please come on out to Powell's Hawthorne (3723 SE Hawthorne) on Monday 11/26! I will discuss the 11-year germination of Perpetua's Kin, share anecdotes from my research, and read from this novel that Powell's bookseller Dianah H. calls "Gorgeous. Devastating. Lyrical. Addictive." (There will also be cookies.) https://www.facebook.com/events/1125532894238690/
Nearly
20 years after I first read Byatt's Booker Prize winner Possession, her
use of the epistolary form still dazzles me. She's unafraid to take up 50 to 60
pages with the "primary texts" of a correspondence. Surely she had
editors nagging her to share only "the highlights" of her characters'
letters. But that would have yielded a fundamentally different novel -- and
probably a flimsy one. Perpetua's Kin has its own lengthy
epistolary sections.
Phillips
conjures mid-century America with such tactile vividness, familial tensions
with such ease, and the scope of tragedy across 3 generations. Her structure
here inspired mine in Perpetua's Kin.
Sentence
for sentence, Fisher's narration hypnotizes. She charged my batteries at a time
early in my writing of Perpetua's Kin, when I (and the novel)
really needed it.
Cited
by Karen Fisher as an antecedent to A Sudden Country, the prophetic
power of White's prose is always inspiring. He won the Nobel Prize in
Literature for good reason. His depiction of landscape and the small figure a
man cuts against the earth remained luminously in my mind during my work
on Perpetua's Kin. (As noted in the acknowledgments, Perpetua's
Kin makes use of a few phrases from Voss.)
An
epic metaphysical mystery spanning decades and continents, winner of the
National Book Award, this inimitable novel gives us the prophetic and
epigrammatic Wilder we know from The Skin of Our Teeth and Our
Town, but here he has the greater breadth of novelistic description
and frequent rhetorical passages. I studied his commanding way of depicting
small incidents within a massive canvas.
Line
for line, Cohen's overlooked jewel of a novel (his debut) goads me on to breathe
freer, see clearer, and do and try more.
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
I
was first exposed to the immortal Dane via Franco Zeffireli's film adaptation,
which I viewed in the cinema when I was 12. I've seen innumerable versions
of Hamlet on film and stage since then, (including the Barbican's unforgettable 1997 RSC production starring Alex Jennings) and I've
never stopped returning to the original text. I've described Perpetua's
Kin as a reworking of Hamlet, and I'd wager that keen
readers will spot the many allusions and outright quotations in the text of the
novel (e.g.; Denmark has Elsinore, while my Northern California of the late
1880s has El Señor).
If
you live in the West, you should know and read Stegner. If you don't live in
the West, you should know and read Stegner. If you love literature, you should
know and read Stegner. National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner and
dedicated teacher.
Ondaatje's distillation of "big-canvas" events through intimate scenes and relationships, his use of alternating points of view, his characteristically evocative turns of phrase, and his central placement and reliance upon imagery -- these are just a few of the things that The English Patient (and, for that matter, most of Ondaatje's novels) -- exemplify for me. Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
It is no exaggeration to say that my first reading of Time’s Arrow changed my life. The sheer authorial bravura on display was like nothing I’d known in contemporary literature. Is there another contemporary work as technically daring and as gracefully executed? The Night Inspectorby Frederick Busch
Busch's masterwork. His use of nineteenth-century parlance, his facility with the violent narratives of Civil War combat, and the sustained intensity of his language, treatment, and themes are all absorbing and instructive. One of the great unsung American novels of the last 20 years.
A
precursor (by 22 years or so) to George Saunders' astonishing
experimental-dramaturgical-collagist-novelizing in Lincoln in the
Bardo. My first reading of Raising Holy Hell was
for me the beginning of a new way of looking at narrative. And Olds'
ventriloquism inspires much of Perpetua's Kin. (I thank my
friend Jon L. for introducing me to Olds' work.)
In both of these novels, Brian Hall demonstrates a breathtaking command of -- and flexibility in -- narrative voice. He is also constantly taking risks as a writer, whether inhabiting the first-person perspective of Sacagawea (and inventing a new narration technique to do so) or scrambling chronology while writing about Robert Frost.
A
document of Manifest Destiny at ground level, and in the form of two unlikely
and fascinating protagonists. The scale of history is, in the end, always
human.
Postman's seminal work of cultural criticism has been on my mind for more than a decade now, and its lessons have in some way infused everything I've written in that time, fiction and nonfiction alike. "We have learned irreverence toward sun and season," Postman writes. And I put those words directly into the mouth of one of the minor characters in Perpetua's Kin.
"The abiding question concerns the American quester, the motive, history, and space of his journey, how that space affects him, and the nature of his own self-apprehension as an other, an American, as he moves in the contemporary world. For Otherness is not merely given, an attribute of others; it can be an attribute of ourselves, either in self-alienation or in response to the relentless gaze of another." I kept this and many other passages from Hassan's book at hand while thinking about Benjamin Lorn's journey(s) in Perpetua's Kin.
I've been reading Trilling since first being introduced to his work via Cynthia Ozick. If you love literature, then Trilling's perspectives, and his ways of thinking about literature on the page -- free from every critical hand-me-down -- are always enriching.
Fussell writes as a World War II veteran committed to tearing down vainglorious delusions about the "nobility" of war. He's a staunch realist, and also an elegant writer. I gleaned so much from this book as well as Fussell's memoir Doing Battle, and I'm thankful for his voice.
