Oct 172013
 

A lovely, loving, sweet essay on reading and children by an old friend.

dg

Where to begin? I remembered a book I had loved in my teens, an obscure Jack London novel, Before Adam, about a modern man haunted by intense dreams of an earlier, ancestral existence as a proto-human named Big-Tooth. The book combined rollicking pre-historic escapades with serious issues of developing consciousness and what it means to be human. Though a bit skeptical at first, Nathaniel agreed to my proposal. And so one evening, as he sat on a chair by the fireplace and I settled on the couch across the room, my son and I read of Big-Tooth and his friend Lop-Ear, the implacable Red-Eye, the desirable Swift One, saber-toothed tigers, wild boars, packs of wolves and, lurking in the background, the dangerously advanced Men of Fire.

Read the rest at The Millions : Silently, Side by Side: Reading with My Son.

Jan 032013
 

So I am sitting in the basement of the Gary Library, surrounded by the psychology collection, shivering in my down coat and Peruvian hat, conversing with one of my new semester students, and I started talking about True Grit (which I taught to a student last semester) and Dog of the South, and then I went online and checked my Twitter feeds and there was a link to this great Bill Morris review of Escape Velocity, A Charles Portis Miscellany @ The Millions. Terrific read, especially if it takes you back to the Portis novels.

dg

 

1. Wisdom in the Wit

If you share my fascination with the mysterious ways writers get made, you’ll be thrilled by a new book called Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. Edited by a long-time Portis devotee, the Arkansas-based writer Jay Jennings, this collection is a virtual connect-the-dots diagram of how Portis the novelist was forged in the newsrooms of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Arkansas Gazette and the New York Herald Tribune, the papers where Portis worked as a reporter and columnist from the late 1950s until the mid-1960s. After a year as the Herald Tribune’s London correspondent, Portis left newspapering in 1964 and went back home to Arkansas to set up shop as a novelist. Over the next quarter-century, he produced five novels that are universally regarded, by those who bothered to read them, as classics.

via The Millions : How Charles Portis Got Made: On Escape Velocity.

Oct 232012
 

In a recent profile of Justin Cronin in the New York Times Magazine, Colson Whitehead is quoted as saying he’d “rather shoot [him]self in the face” than have another discussion about literature genres. I don’t blame him. When people ask me what kind of fiction I write, I usually say, “It’s about people,” and leave it at that. But as I read Ringwald’s book, I found myself pondering literary fiction: as a genre, as a taxonomical category. When It Happens to You, you see, is a sterling example of literary fiction, if we were to consider literary fiction as a straightforward genre like romance or science fiction, with certain expected tropes and motifs.

What, you ask, are some attributes of this genre? Read on, my friend, read on.

via The Millions : Literary Fiction is a Genre: A List.