By Foster Kamer 7/26/12 4:48pm

Haters Gon Hate

wonder-boys

Confessions of an Obsessively Jealous MFA Workshop Colleague of Successful Novelist Joshua Ferris

Have you ever seen Wonder Boys, the movie based on the book by Michael Chabon? In the first scene, it takes you inside a grad school fiction workshop, where various students undercut each other through passive-aggressive critique. It is utterly painful and also rings true (as far as we’ve heard, having never experienced the masochistic impulse to seek out graduate studies, let alone the studies themselves). Inevitably, one student will be more successful than the others, and the others will no doubt, in most instances, begrudge them that success. Of course, it is uncouth to publicly begrudge one success, so most people will just go about this in the most passive and cowardly way possible.

Until now! Read More

By Molly Fischer 7/17/09 6:18pm

A Very Hot Granta Party

Addressing the crowd from the cash register-cum-bar, John Freeman gave a classic old-media rallying cry.

“Magazines and bookstores are in the same boat,” he told the crowd. “We’re all floating or sinking together.”

Mr. Freeman hosted his first release party as Granta editor on Thursday night at Three Lives & Co. But whatever his trepidation Read More

By Leon Neyfakh 1/27/09 8:46pm

Why Do Young Male Writers Love Icky, Tough Guy Deadbeats?

Emotionally misshapen losers are taking over contemporary literature!

Just kidding. Those guys have been running the show for centuries. But it does seem like every other literary novel that comes out these days has at its center some variation on the classic antihero—a character whose flaws are worn plainly if not Read More

By Emily Bobrow 3/05/07 12:00am

Wage Slaves in Their Natural Habitat

Office life—that Beckettian game of Whac-a-Mole—is the subject of Then We Came to the End, an amusing debut novel from Joshua Ferris. Told in the collective first-person, a know-it-all “we” (like The Virgin Suicides), this is a book about the disposable, often awkward, sometimes precious, usually tedious moments of the workday. “How we hated our Read More