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Fiction, Non-Fiction, “Popularity,” and “Seriousness”
Back in December-January, I wrote a series of posts on fiction and non-fiction writers, in particular, on the relative endurance of their writings in posterity. I wondered whether essayists and...
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Ann Patchett is Wrong About the Pulitzers
Ann Patchett has an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times, which waxes angsty over the failure of the Pulitzer committee to award a prize in fiction this year: This decision, besides affecting book sales,...
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Colm Tóibín on the ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined’
Colm Tóibín writes of the intimate relationship between facts and fiction (‘What Is Real Is Imagined’, New York Times, July 14 2012), about how the story-teller’s primary responsibility is to the...
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Concert at the Corner
The boy with the violin case came around the corner. On time, as always. Head bowed, feet dragging on the sidewalk, the case drooping by his side, as always. He approached A__’s gang, scattered on the...
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Lord Byron on the Writerly Compulsion
In Oryx and Crake, Crake quotes Lord Byron:¹ What is it Byron said? Who’d write if they could do otherwise? Something like that. Who indeed? Byron’s supposed description² of writerly obsession is by...
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Fiction On Philosophy Reading Lists
Last week, over at the NewAPPS (Arts, Politics, Philosophy, Science) blog, where I’ve started blogging as part of a group of academic philosophers, I posted the following: In my post yesterday, I had...
View ArticleChaim Potok’s ‘The Chosen’: Talking About Religion, Identity, And Culture In...
Last week, the students in this semester’s edition of my Philosophical Issues in Literature class began reading and discussing Chaim Potok‘s The Chosen. (We have just concluded our discussions of...
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