Category: literary life

Does a standing ovation count when you pay for sixty of your closest friends to be in attendance? (Link via Moby) We like you Stephen, we really do. And you didn’t even have to buy us dinner.

Scott Spencer talks about the thrills of being nominated for the National Book Award, for A Ship Made of Paper. (The other finalists are T.C. Boyle, Shirley Hazzard, Edward P. Jones and Marianne Wiggins.) For Spencer, the accolades are great, but not nearly as exciting as publishing his first book

”I’ve had a lot of really good things happen to me in my career, but I don’t think I’ve had anything that meant as much to me as having my first novel published,” he said, leaning forward slightly in his armchair. ”It was like having my identity validated. I got my ticket punched, I wasn’t going to be asked to leave the room.”

Martin Amis has a tribute to Saul Bellow in the December issue of The Atlantic.

The American novel, having become dominant, was in turn dominated by the Jewish-American novel, and everybody knows who dominated that: Saul Bellow. His was and is a pre-eminence that rests not on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to waste your breath.

Amis talks about the preoccupations of Saul Bellow’s characters, and adds:

Of course, the Jewish-American novel subsumes the experience of the immigrant, with an “old country” at one remove; and the emphasis is on the anxiety of entitlement (marked in Roth, too, and in Malamud). It is not an anxiety about succeeding, about making good; it is an anxiety about the right to pronounce, the right to judge

Maud is sick. Old Hag is sick. And I’m sick. The simultaneity of our symptoms is further proof that we’re all part of a literary cabal.

It took twelve years to write, but Virginia Stuart stuck with it. She was working on a tale of three Danish sisters who rescue Jews during the holocaust, and now at age 89, she just published the novel.

Audrey Niffenegger talks to the Globe and Mail about how she got the idea for the book.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is the story of Henry DeTamble, a librarian with Chrono-Displacement disorder, a rare genetic condition that transports him through time and space, mostly to periods within his own life. It’s during one of these jaunts that the Mobius strip of cause and effect takes shape: A married, middle-aged Henry first meets his wife Clare as a six-year-old girl. The book chronicles their tortured relationship through past, present and future.

She also talks about what happened after Brad and Jen took an interest in her work.