Bookslut | Issue 158 | September/October 2015 Review 31 Home | Review 31 Book Nook Club Paris Review Daily - Blog, Writers, Poets, Artists - Paris Review Donald Barthelme would’ve been, and should be, eighty-three today. It would be an exaggeration to say that I feel the absence of someone whom I never met—someone who died when I was three—but I do wonder, with something more than mere curiosity, what Barthelme would have made of the past twenty-odd years. These are decades I feel we’ve processed less acutely because he wasn’t there to fictionalize them: their surreal political flareups, their new technologies, their various zeitgeists and intellectual fads and dumb advertisements. Part of what I love about Barthelme’s stories is the way they traffic in cultural commentary without losing their intimacy, their humanity. But I’m losing the thread. My point is not to reveal a secret wish that Barthelme was my uncle. I wanted to say something about lists. A zombie advances toward a group of thin blooming daughters and describes, with many motions of his hands and arms, the breakfasts they may expect in a zombie home.
Share Book Recommendations With Your Friends, Join Book Clubs, Answer Trivia The Rumpus.net ReadersAdvice.com The Allen Ginsberg Project LibraryReads: The September list - Blog Post | BookPage Because we love libraries, we're very excited about the new LibraryReads program. In case you haven't heard about it, here's how it works: Library staffers across the country nominate the books coming out each month that they've really enjoyed reading and are most eager to recommend to library patrons. The 10 that receive the most nominations are compiled onto a list of books that have the endorsement of not just one but many librarians—so you know they're going to be good. Without further ado, the September LibraryReads list: 1. 2. As the holiday season approaches, the search for a missing woman draws Chief Inspector Gamache to the small town of Three Pines. 3. When the daughter of a cult film director dies in a suspicious accident, investigative journalist Scott McGrath is determined to uncover the truth. 4. After her parents are murdered, teenager Sylvie Mason must find the courage to explore her family’s many secrets—including the strange sounds coming from their basement. 5. 6. 7.
David Foster Wallace on Writing, Self-Improvement, and How We Become Who We Are by Maria Popova “Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.” In late 1999, David Foster Wallace — poignant contemplator of death and redemption, tragic prophet of the meaning of life, champion of intelligent entertainment, admonisher against blind ambition, advocate of true leadership — called the office of the prolific writer-about-writing Bryan A. Over the course of the exchange, the two struck up a friendship and began an ongoing correspondence, culminating in Garner’s extensive interview with Wallace, conducted on February 3, 2006, in Los Angeles — the kind of conversation that reveals as much about its subject matter, in this case writing and language, as it does about the inner workings of its subject’s psyche. Wallace begins at the beginning, responding to Garner’s request to define good writing: This act of paying attention, Wallace argues, is a matter of slowing oneself down. The writing writing that I do is longhand. . . .
dovegreyreader scribbles The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily Routine Reflecting on the ritualization of creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that “air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.” Samuel Johnson similarly contended that “a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” And yet some of history’s most successful and prolific writers were women and men of religious daily routines and odd creative rituals. (Even Buk himself ended up sticking to a peculiar daily routine.) Such strategies, it turns out, may be psychologically sound and cognitively fruitful. In the altogether illuminating 1994 volume The Psychology of Writing (public library), cognitive psychologist Ronald T. [There is] evidence that environments, schedules, and rituals restructure the writing process and amplify performance… The principles of memory retrieval suggest that certain practices should amplify performance. Kellogg reviews a vast body of research to extract a few notable findings.