I bookended my year of short story reading with Steven Millhauser, not by design but because sometimes things just work out this way. The first story I read in 2010 was Millhauser’s “The Wizard of West Orange.” It comes from his collection Laughter in the Dark (which I sadly had to take back to the [...]
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"Here is something else I know: the power of literature to 'renew a sense of purpose in our lives' gets killed in literature classrooms — unintentionally, no doubt, but killed nonetheless."
- #"Technically, they are voted, but actually they are not decided by the use of whatever artistic and critical wisdom Hollywood may happen to possess. They are ballyhooed, pushed, yelled, screamed, and in every way propagandized into the consciousness of the voters so incessantly, in the weeks before the final balloting, that everything except the golden aura of the box office is forgotten." --Raymond Chandler, 1948
- #"But Welty is not a regional writer—her purview is much smaller than that. Her writing is bound up in the romance of everyday objects, in the vagaries of memory and how they become tied to a place, a room, a piece of furniture, or a trinket. Proust had his madeleine, but Welty had pralines."
- #"I would write these epic, too long story drafts. And I kept thinking one would, on its own accord, take root and flourish in my brain. And I guess this thing sort of did. It wasn’t a straightforward flourishing. It was swamp sprawl." Karen Russell on the early days of Swamplandia!
- #Even The New Yorker itself is forced to admit that Jonathan Franzen's essay on Edith Wharton treads very little new ground.
- #"If you play a lot of Charles Ives, you have to put up with the raised eyebrows of other musicians, who refer to him as 'a crazy insurance salesman.' This is frustrating. He was actually a spectacular insurance salesman who co-founded an agency and made a fortune." Jeremy Denk is witty and charming as always in The New Yorker [subscription required].
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