October 2007

On Deck +

Contributors +

“Smarts, not platform, is what matters.” – Wired Magazine on Dzanc Books (congrats, Dan)

(via ed)

“This seems to me to get at the heart of some of the problems of literary fiction: in short, and to be totally bald about it, perhaps novelists often feel so alienated from the world that they end up writing about worlds which fail to reconnect with readers. This is more about class alienation than anything else. I’m tired of reading books about writers and teachers, books that seem to imagine writers and teachers as the only people whose inner lives are worthy of consideration.”

- Anne Fernald on Contemporary Fiction by way of Tom Perrotta

“But in my opinion, judgment is only the precursor to criticism, its necessary spark but not at all its fulfillment, which is only to be found in the further elucidation of the way the work constitutes itself as a work of fiction or poetry, of the specific nature of the experience of reading the work attentively.”

- Dan Green discussing Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America

“Alice Sebold’s second novel The Almost Moon will probably not be categorized as literary fiction by most readers, but more than anything else this is because her first novel The Lovely Bones was such a smash bestseller. If Lovely Bones had sold 5000 copies instead of a million, Almost Moon probably would be considered literary fiction. So is failure actually an essential rather than an accidental attribute of literary fiction?”

- Levi Asher

“This Jeremy Denk is a voice that, effectively, could never have been heard before the advent of the Internet: sophisticated on the one hand, informal on the other, immediate in impact. Blogs such as this put a human face on an alien culture.”

- Alex Ross on classical music on the Web

“He thinks the greatest novelists are Tolstoy, Mann, Dostoevsky, and Proust. The greatest novels: Anna Karenina, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov. He learned to be a more experimental writer by reading Borges, Nabokov, and Calvino.”

– James Tata reporting on a Orhan Pamuk lecture

comment Orhan Pamuk

“This past week’s National Book Award nominations for poetry are a scandal that should get somebody fired, not so much for the poets who were chosen – most are credible examples of the same small school of writing – as for the selection of the panel who did the choosing. Charles Simic, Linda Bierds, David St. John, Vijay Seshadri, and Natasha Trethewey may be diverse in terms of gender, race, even age, but all five represent the same neophobe movement in American letters. There is not one post-avant, not one third-way, visual, slam or other kind of poet.”

– Ron Silliman



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