An Interview with Jean-Philippe Toussaint

"One summer long ago after reading Crime and Punishment I began to write. I don’t know if there’s a direct link, a perfect cause and effect relationship, who knows, a theorem (people who read Crime and Punishment start writing a month later), but in my case that’s how it was: one month after finishing Crime and Punishment I started writing—and I’m still writing. . ."

John, not Frank

 

Naipaul and Theroux

I've been reading essays from Paul Theroux's Figures in a Landscape: People and Places and V.S. Naipaul's The Writer and the World.

Interview with Eleanor Henderson

"The following is a reprint of an interview originally published in 2010 at When Falls the Coliseum. Since publication of her debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints, Eleanor Henderson has gone on to publish additional works, teach college full-time, and, I believe at least briefly, venture into the world of bookstore ownership."

~~ from "Eleanor Henderson on Frederick Exley"

Vonnegut and his disastrous car dealership

"Writing is a precarious profession. We are broke, for the most part. We work jobs we often don't enjoy to keep the lights on: Faulkner at the post office, Vonnegut and his disastrous car dealership, every writer you know and their faculty gig. The average author doesn't make enough from their royalties to clear the poverty line. Most books do not even make back their advance, meaning they earn no royalties for the author at all. When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize, she thanked her food bank. Our work is stolen to train the software of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence companies run by people who believe art is a problem to be solved."

~~ from One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

sweaters and shoes

Enjoy savings on quality "as new" sweaters and shoes.