In 2012, a slew of rock-star writers published disappointing novels, and a bunch of actual rock stars wrote crappy memoirs. There were some bright corners, but let’s begin with the aging rock stars. Time is not on their side. Read More
The phrase “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” has been a rallying cry in music since Neil Young crooned it over 30 years ago. But it’s writers who seem to best embody the sentiment: the burnouts who did themselves in, like Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, tend to be romanticized long after their deaths by those who believe an untimely end completes some sort of narrative of depression; the ones who fade, the writers who keep pushing out words till their last breath, may not be eulogized, but at least they get to spend their golden years doing what they (presumably) love.
Last month, Philip Roth, one of America’s greatest living writers and its reigning curmudgeon, took a very different route toward career conclusion: he quit. The 79-year-old author of 27 novels, dozens of short stories and countless essays, and the recipient of nearly every major literary award save the Nobel Prize, told an interviewer for the French publication Les Inrocks, “To tell you the truth, I’m done.” His 2010 novel Nemesis would be his last book. Read More
Imagine for a moment that an infant alien blob has oozed its way into the Columbus Circle subway station and through a miraculous process of osmosis managed to absorb the most important material from a rack of women’s magazines. The blob would have a lot of direction about how a person should be. It would have a repertoire of 10 Things to Do With Mason Jars and know how to “upcycle” things. It would know how to execute the “G Spot Jiggy” and have some useful suggestions about what to wear to a wedding. But then something terrible would happen: for the rest of its life, from having received an injection of Seventeen, Readymade and Elle in a formative moment, the abiogenetic marvel that was the alien blob would experience the constant assault of dubious information flitting through its organ of reasoning. As it blobbed about it would never be able to forget the minimum Sun Protection Factor to wear out of doors, even in winter. When it squeezed its pimples it would be forced to recall from the magazines that pimples should never be squeezed. Thus besieged with all it knew of how to be, and aware of its consistent failure to fulfill even the simple mandates of some listicles, the alien would despair. Read More
“We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists,” begins the fiction piece in the latest issue of the literary journal n+1. “Every era has its art form. The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel.”
The narrator is a female playwright obsessed with becoming a world-renowned genius. It’s still a Read More
