Teju Cole on John Updike

"Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel prize twenty years ago."

Alice Munro

John Barth, Paul Auster, Alice Munro—who's next?

And who did we forget so soon?

". . . one of the most talented and interesting young writers . . ."

It's hard to beat James Alan McPherson's high praise of Rick Harsch.

 

the inner life

"To focus on the inner life today—to read books, to imagine with no ulterior agenda, to reflect on painful or confusing experiences—is to defy the clamoring edicts of our age, the buy messages, the endless pleas for followers and likes.

"Writers have to find a different way of being in the world. The making of literature is the manner by which we come to understand our inner lives, by which we travel in difficult truth toward elusive mercy, and thereby reaffirm the bonds of human kindness."

~~ from Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow by Steve Almond

throw money at me

"Back in 2003, for instance, I fell into a sustained depression. As is often the case, the trigger was a major creative disappointment. Two years earlier, I'd published my first book, a collection of short stories. I naturally expected this triumph would banish all the doubt I had ever felt, vanquish my rivals, and compel old girlfriends to drunk-dial me in the middle of the night. People would probably also throw money at me as I walked down the sidewalk. Instead, the book sold a few hundred copies and my agent told me to write a novel."

~~ from Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow by Steve Almond

another human being in pain

"[As writers,] we always turn away from unbearable feeling. We want to feel sure of ourselves. We want to skip the part of the story where the hero falls apart. It's an instinct. But that's the story that the reader wants to hear, the one only another human being in pain can tell them."

~~ from Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow by Steve Almond