Where Now? Let’s Go!
I don’t think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it’s enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of...
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In the Theater of Isak Dinesen
ROBERT GOLDBERG/AP IMAGESIsak Dinesen, 1959 Known in this country by her pseudonym, Isak Dinesen, the Danish writer Karen Blixen published her first collection of stories in 1934, at the age of 49....
View ArticleTelling It Slant: On J.M. Coetzee
In his memoir Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, published in the United States in 1997, John Coetzee is a young boy living on a housing estate outside the town of Worcester in South Africa. To his...
View ArticleA Passionate Reader: On David Markson
We don’t know much for sure about Kate, the narrator of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. She is, or believes herself to be, the last person left on earth. She makes brief references to...
View ArticleTill the Knowing Ends: On William Gass
Deep inside his new collection of essays Life Sentences, in a discussion of mimesis, in the middle of a paragraph about the Pythagorean world of numbers and the differences between perfect Forms and...
View ArticleSelf-Portrait in a Sheet Mirror: On Vivian Maier
Imagine being the kind of person who finds everything provocative. All you have to do is set out on a walk through city streets, a Rolleiflex hanging from a strap around your neck, and your heart...
View ArticleRagged, Unkempt, Strange: On William Faulkner
One morning in the late spring of 1962, William Faulkner rode his horse Stonewall across his property, following a bridle path through a forested area known as Bailey’s Woods. When he reached the...
View ArticleThe Virtues of Difficult Fiction
Who Needs Fiction? That was the question I saw on signs around Stockholm during a recent visit. The signs were advertising a local museum, but being a novelist, I took the question as a direct...
View ArticleNever-Endings
The French writer Georges Perec was drawn to self-imposed challenges. He wrote one short novel without ever using the letter E, and another in which E is the only vowel used. With Raymond Queneau and...
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