"[...] bathroom book for the literary reader"

"If you're an avid follower of contemporary fiction — if you bookmark The Millions, subscribe to Bookforum, grind your teeth over the latest flap involving Jonathan Franzen, and, first thing, pull out the Book Review when you get the Sunday New York Times — then John Freeman’s How To Read A Novelist is the perfect, and perfectly modest, book.

     It’s a bathroom book for the literary reader, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Composed of 55 short author profiles that Freeman wrote between 2004 and 2013 for dozens of newspapers and magazines in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it’s a terrific compendium of insights into what contemporary writers are thinking and how they present themselves. The subjects range from Nobel Laureates (Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Imre Kertész, among others), writers who deserve to be Laureates (Philip Roth, Don DeLillo), top-tier novelists from all over the world (Edmundo Paz Soldán, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie), a raft of younger American hotshots (Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, William T. Vollmann, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mark Z. Danielewski), and other big names like Margaret Atwood, E.L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Haruki Murakami.
     The profiles are usually five to seven book pages and readable in 10 minutes or so: roughly what you’d get in a front-page spread in the 'arts and culture' section of a newspaper. They’re quick glimpses into an author’s life and work, and usually based on two- or three-hour interviews with the authors, held occasionally in their homes or in restaurants or, more often than not, in their publicist’s offices or in hotel rooms while they’re touring in support of their latest books."
— Cornel Bonca, Los Angeles Review of Books
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 Buy this book here...

“[...] let the soda crackers be soda crackers” [which] “are mysterious enough as it is.” — Saul Bellow

For the nineteenth time in nineteen years, the Nobel Prize in Literature has gone to a writer outside of the US. As with most people in this country, the members of Still Eating Oranges were previously unfamiliar with the work of Chinese author Mo Yan. If he is as talented as last year’s winner, Tomas Tranströmer, then we have reason to be excited. As usual, though, a certain group (comprised mostly of Americans) has come out to criticize the Nobel committee for snubbing Cormac McCarthy or Joyce Carol Oates or Philip Roth. Those familiar with this annual tradition will remember that Roth, in particular, has become the cause célèbre for angry American pundits. The US has not had a laureate since Toni Morrison, the logic goes; and so there must be bias afoot. […]

     A certain literary culture dominates contemporary American schools and publications. In the past, we have considered a few of the effects—brutish, ironic and conflict-based stories—of this establishment. Its heroes and models are the world’s Roths, Raymond Carvers, John Updikes and Jonathan Franzens; its laws are 'subtext over surface,' 'sincerity kills' and 'realism trumps exaggeration.' It began to take off in and around the 1950s, popularized by the writing of Norman Mailer, Roth and others. It took root irrevocably in the following decades. This coincided with the rise of ever-more-unavoidable, ever-more-strict MFA programs and writers’ workshops, which indoctrinated at least two generations of writers into the same mentality.
     Today, peer pressure, school curricula, editorial taste and online writing guides ensure that new American writers all feed from the same trough."
— still eating oranges
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Retirement is a four letter word...

"Ruth Rendell's most famous creation, Chief Inspector Wexford, has retired, and at the age of 83, with more than 70 books under her belt and a Labour life peerage, she'd be forgiven if her thoughts were beginning to drift towards a gentle exit from the world of letters. After all, the 79-year-old Philip Roth, after a similarly half-century-spanning career, told the world he was 'done' with writing last year, and hasn't looked back.
     When I ask if this is the case, Rendell, resplendent and formidable in a red velvet cardigan, leans forward on the sofa in her bright Maida Vale house and looks horrified. 'I couldn't do that. It's what I do and I love doing it,' she says. 'It's absolutely essential to my life. I don't know what I would do if I didn't write.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Get Ruth Rendell's latest (writing as Barbara Vine) here...