Hugh Blanton's review of Auggie's Revenge

Hugh Blanton smiles and laughs like he enjoyed the novel, and he offers insight into the book as well. There are several ways to acquire an affordable copy as an e-book or paperback.

beach reads

Enjoy the sun with a novel or two unless an eclectic mix of poetry and fiction suits you.

This is not the signed copy linked to above.

nine weeks to a novel's first draft

I've had success getting full first drafts out in eight to ten weeks, and I once heard an extremely well published and recognized novelist say that he gets a short version of first draft out in about six weeks and then revises it over a couple years. I will often revise for longer than that. Anyway, Brooke Berman may have the help you need to get past the first-draft jitters and shakes.

#fridayreads

Find affordable Auggie's Revenge here, here, here, and here.

3/17/26 update: And at Smashwords, too.

unable to understand

"Most of the time I find my consolation, laugh if you like, Doctor, in inconsolability. If I am alone I feel like being with people; if I am with people I feel like being alone. I go to the greatest pains to understand others as though they were myself and I am utterly unable to understand any mind but my own."

~~ from Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

he wasn't fitted for this post

"Instead, he said, in keeping with his nature: I could think of nothing else but that notice in the newspaper. And he said: My wife discouraged me from coming here; she wants me to apply for a position, but she thought this one a bad idea. She said he wasn't fitted for this post, that he was a teacher. She said to him: You're a teacher; and she said, as she invariably did: A bad teacher."

~~ from Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

nothing is more irritating than books

"There was not a single book in the industrialist's house, my father said; he deliberately kept books out of the house in order not to be irritated. After all, nothing is more irritating than books if you want to be alone, must be alone."

~~ from Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

I wanted to be important

"When I was coming of age, writers such as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were titans. Like my ambitious father, I wanted to be important. Yet in my latter career, novelists have been precipitously demoted. Even Jonathan Franzen isn’t Jonathan Franzen any more. Nowadays, the most any of us litfic types can hope for is a Netflix option."

~~ from Lionel Shriver's "Don't Write Off Literary Fiction Just Yet" 

affordable copies available online

At eBay, we found affordable new copies of Auggie's Revenge as well as fine or near fine copies of the first edition of Fight for Your Long Day. Other sellers offer new and used copies of each novel.

summerwater

"He grunts and looks out the window. She thinks he's not really all that interested in that book, which looks to be another five-hundred-page lump by another—what's the word—preposterous, propensity, no, the other one, wealthy, well off, ha, prosperous, that's it, another prosperous and preposterous Englishman about how the world is ending because no one is doing what the writer thinks they ought to do, learning obsolete words for insects or scrubbing floors on their hands and knees with wooden brushes or exposing babies to germs, usually something the writer imagines that women or the lower orders did before he was born. She doesn't know why David goes on buying them."

~~ from Summerwater by Sarah Moss

Old Masters: A Comedy

 

Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters won't disappoint.

new Nadelman review

Consider Philadelphia in the 1980s in a new review of Eugene Nadelman by Michael Weingrad.

Twenty great, good, or at least not bad novels I've read that were published in the 21st century

(1) The Sellout by Paul Beatty

(2) Heaven by Mieko Kawakami 

(3) Convenience Store Woman by Sayata Murata
(4) Zone by Mathias Enard 

(5) Inside Story: A novel by Martin Amis 

(6) 2666 by Roberto Bolano
(7) Outline by Rachel Cusk
(8) Wake up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames
(9) Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

(10) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
(11) The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
(12) Netherland by Joseph O'Neill 

(13) The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford 

(14) The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
(15) The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
(16) Open City by Teju Cole
(17) Home Land by Sam Lipsyte
(18) The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage
(19) Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin
(20) The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

thank goodness

Thank goodness I've not a single offending sentence or three among my published novels and short stories, so I need not concern myself with ever getting canceled. I'm free!

Rabbit's last stop (sort of)

 

from Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

made for each other

"In the early years at least, Kingsley and Jane seemed made for each other. It was an unusual and unusually stimulating menage: two passionately dedicated novelists who were also passionately in love. Their approach to the daily business of writing formed a clear contrast, one from which I derived a tentative theory between the difference between and male and female fiction. Kingsley was a grinder; no matter how he was feeling (sickly, clogged, loth — or plain hungover, if you prefer), he trudged off to his desk after breakfast; there was a half-hour lunchbreak, and that was that until it was time for evening drinks. Jane was far more spasmodic and compulsive. She would wander from room to room, she would do some cooking or some gardening, and plenty of smoking as she stared out of the sitting-room window with arms folded and an air of anxious preoccupation. Then she would suddenly hasten to her study, and you'd hear the clutter of her typewriter keys. Quite soon, she would shyly emerge, having written more in an hour than my father would write in a day."

~~ from Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis

Whom or who, again?

"Number two: the 'who' or 'whom' business. This is very slightly trickier. 'John, whom I know to be an honourable man' is right; 'John, whom I know is an honourable man' is wrong. Here's what you do: you mentally recast the subclauses as main clauses — 'I know him to be an honourable man', 'I know he is an honourable man' — and your ear will guide you: 'him' demands 'whom', and 'he' demands 'who' . . . In conversational prose be wary of whom. In the closing pages of Herzog, Bellow writes, 'Whom was I kidding?' This is grammatically correct; it also leaves the sentence up on one stilt. 'Whom the fuck d'you think you're looking at?' Or even worse, 'At whom the fuck d'you think you're looking?' Never worry about ending a sentence with a preposition. 'That rule', Churchill famously said, 'is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.'"

~~ from Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis

American Book Review

"Kudera's intimate understanding of the stressors placed on adjunct faculty members on any day, but especially their long day, is powerful. Throughout the development of the novel, Duffleman takes on many different identities as he puts on the hats of different universities, deals with the demands of the students, and faces the unplanned situations that happen on a college campus."

to know nothing

"After this last letter, everything changed. After this last letter, Vicente wanted only to know nothing; to know nothing about anything. To be brutally, absolutely ignorant of everything. He wanted to learn what it meant not to know. He wanted to live in darkness. He wanted not to know any more, but more than that, he wanted to no longer know. To no longer know anything. Not even the things he already knew. He no longer wanted to know anything about what was already past and about what might happen in the future. Not to his mother, or to his brother—nor to his wife or his children, or himself."

~~ from The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena

#fridayreads

Buy here to support independent bookstores, and here for a reasonable total price outside of the United States and United Kingdom. Of course, there are other options. 

Whatever happened to that black "poem" tee-shirt?