Category: creative-process
- 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
- What Is Liberation?Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment by John Giono. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 368 pp. $25.49. **** For the two years I lived in Cambridge—1991-93, while my wife was in Divinity School—I was in bookstore heaven. It seems strange to say nowadays, when bookstores barely exist. There was the Harvard ...Read more
- How He Thought of MeMy First Shrink Every time I ever went to a therapist, I went because I was in physical pain. The first time, because the whole idea was so foreign to me, it took me months to finally pull the trigger. I also felt reluctant because I was afraid of what he’d say. I was afraid he’d ...Read more
- Jane Austen He’s NotPierre, or The Ambiguities by Herman Melville. Library of America pp.1-421. **1/2 It’s a bad sign when you finish the book and breathe a huge sigh of relief. I have enormous admiration for Herman Melville. Of all the 19th century American novelists, his career has the largest span. He began with popular books like Typee and Omoo, ...Read more
- The Itch to WriteNotes During a Pandemic One of the great pleasures of talking to my brother frequently—which I’ve been doing lately–is hearing of writers I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Bill mentioned to me, for instance, that he had just bought two volumes of the reviews of Marjorie Perloff, a name I’d never heard. She writes regularly for the ...Read more
- Born WriterWhat Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young. Harper Collins. 320 pp. $15.99 Damon Young is famous as a blogger, co-founder of the website Very Smart Brothas, and in What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker has done something deceptively difficult: pulled together a collection of essays all of which stand perfectly well on ...Read more
- Young Master Surpasses His IdolThe Durrell Miller Letters 1935-80. Edited by Ian S. MacNiven. New Directions. 528 pp. ****1/2 In 1935, 23-year-old Lawrence Durrell wrote Henry Miller a fan letter about his novel Tropic of Cancer, which he had either found discarded in a public lavatory (the story he told) or was lent by a friend. “It strikes me as ...Read more
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Unfinished LivesAmerican OriginalLosing ItKeep an Eye on IgorAnd Is He Pissed
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (121)American literature (215)art (113)Buddhism (169)Christianity (125)creative process (246)death and dying (139)meditation (123)movies (160)music (36)race (105)religion (187)sex (170)spirituality (170)the art of narrative (252)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)