Category: creative-process
- Memo to Jake Barnes: It’s Called Oral SexThe Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918-1926. Library of America, pp 369-570. ***** One of the mildly annoying facts about the Hemingway oeuvre is that the Hemingway stand-in—easy to identify in every book—is always irresistible to women. Maybe Hemingway himself was irresistible; at least four wives that we ...Read more
- Hem IIIHemingway | The Blank Page | 1944-1961 a film by Ken Burns and Kim Novick. Streaming on PBS **** The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918-1926 by Ernest Hemingway. Library of America. 850 pp. ***** There’s nothing about the writing or production values that makes this third episode of Hemingway not as good as the others, ...Read more
- Hem IIHemingway: The Avatar (1929-1944) A film by Ken Burns and Kim Novick. Available on PBS Streaming. ***** Once again, in this second episode, I was stuck by Hemingway’s youth (he was already calling himself Papa in 1929, at the age of thirty). By the end of this episode he’s just 45 years old, and he’s already ...Read more
- HemHemingway | A Writer (1899-1929) a film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Available on PBS streaming. ***** Hemingway was the first writer I loved and the primary inspiration for my becoming a writer. When I was fifteen years old my English teacher told us to read a biography of a writer, and I chose a ...Read more
- Portrait of a Lunatic (You Wrote About the Wrong Cousin, Iris Murdoch)The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. Penguin Classics. 495 pp. $20.00 ***** The Sea, the Sea has everything going for it. It’s large and expansive, beautifully written; it contains a wealth of fascinating characters; it traces a wild plot, where things keep happening that you can’t believe, and it comes to an emotionally satisfying confusion. ...Read more
- Portrait of the Artists Through a Boozy HazeEarly Novels and Stories by James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country. Library of America. 970 pp. In the midst of the endless current theorizing about race and sexuality and gender identity, and talk of all the books we must read (I hate to be told I must read a book), ...Read more
- Alice’s GazeLosing Alice a series by Sigan Avin. On Apple TV. With Ayelet Zurer, Lihi Kornowski, Gal Toren. **** Losing Alice is one of the stranger things I’ve ever seen on a screen. It’s a movie about the creative process, the artistic careers of women and men, and the lengths to which people will go to create ...Read more
- I Like IkeThe Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer Volume II: A Friend of Kafka to Passions. Library of America. 856 pp. ***** Back in the days when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories appeared in the New Yorker, I never missed one. It was a thrill to read the work of a man who wrote so vividly, who seemed ...Read more
- And Talk They DidLet Them All Talk a film by Steven Soderbergh. With Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, Candice Bergen, Gemma Chan, Lucas Hedges. Available on HBO Plus. ***** At one point in Let Them All Talk, a movie about three old college friends who do a crossing on the Queen Mary 2, Susan (Dianne Wiest) stops an awkward conversation ...Read more
- Gone Fishin’Haven’t Posted in a While I wanted to drop a line to my loyal readers to say that the reason I haven’t posted in a while is that I recently got an idea for a longer writing project and want to take a look at that. I never know if a longer project is going to ...Read more
- She Never MellowedThe Last of Her Kind a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 375 pp. $25.00. In one of her novels—I think it was What Are You Going Through—Sigrid Nunez quoted the famous first line of The Good Soldier, though I don’t think she identified the book by name: “This is the saddest story I ...Read more
- Clearing the DecksA Feather on the Breath of God a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Picador. 192 pp. $14.39 **** One puzzle about Sigrid Nunez is why this excellent writer didn’t publish her first book until she was 44 years old. She was writing from the time she was in college; we know that from Sempre Susan, in which ...Read more
- The Height of her PowersThe Friend a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 224 pp. $10.39. I don’t know how Sigrid Nunez does it. She seems to begin her novels any old place, with whatever event comes to mind, and moves on from there. She doesn’t tell stories chronologically or in any particular way, but they fall right into place. ...Read more
- Oh Susie QSempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 128 pp. $16.00. ***** I always thought of Susan Sontag as the most fearsome intellectual in America, if not on the face of the earth. With that wild shock of dark hair with its gray streak, she wrote books on a wide variety of ...Read more
- What Finally MattersWhat Are You Going Through: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 224 pp. $19.59. ***** The idea sounds grim beyond belief. Our narrator—living in New York—has a friend in a nearby town who is dying of cancer. At first the woman seems to be in remission, but then the cancer comes back with a vengeance, ...Read more
- Damned Is RightDamned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson. Grove Press. 800 pp. $22.00. **** Four Men Shaking: Searching for Sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and My Perfect Zen Teacher by Lawrence Shainberg. Shambhala. 134 pp. $16.95 ***** The story told in the first half of James Knowlson’s excellent biography is thrilling and fascinating. ...Read more
- Take Me Out to the Flat ScreenAnd the Fake Noise Goes Wild! I don’t know if people have noticed, but it’s a great time to be a sports fan. The US Open of Tennis just happened, as did the Open of Golf; the basketball playoffs are in full swing and the baseball playoffs about to start, at the same time that the ...Read more
- Don’t Say Can’tMy Second Shrink I don’t remember what compelled me to see a therapist the second time, but I suspect it was the depression I felt while rejections came in on my second novel. It took me two years to write that book, riding to the library every morning on my bike, staying home on the days ...Read more
- Portrait of the Artist as a Nervous WreckDamned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson. Grove Press. 800 pp. $22.00. I don’t know what I expected from a biography of Samuel Beckett, but it wasn’t this. I actually owned the Deidre Bair bio, but couldn’t get into it. In more recent years, I read—and was stunned by—Beckett’s famous Three Novels, ...Read more
- And Another ThingMy First Shrink II The most valuable thing my first therapist did for me was to suggest I could rearrange my life to do the thing I loved, that I didn’t have to stay in a job just because I was good at it or because it seemed safe. I could completely upend my life. It ...Read more
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You Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseThe Nothing of GodWe Are Stardust We Are Golden
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (197)art (109)Buddhism (163)Christianity (119)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (152)music (36)race (95)religion (180)sex (157)spirituality (167)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)