Is Bill Watterson returning to comics? Gracy Olmstead suggests, “Now, after all this time, Watterson is free to create again—to create something new.” (via Prufrock)
Category Archives: Authors
Starr endorsement
Author Rachel Starr Thompson takes up valuable space in an interview to say nice things about my work.
I could never do the grit Lars Walker does, but I kind of wish I had written The Year of the Warrior. Wolf Time is amazing too. Actually, I love all of Lars’s books. – See more here
Child on ‘Day of the Jackal’
From this interview in England last September, author Lee Child mentions Fredrick Forsyth.
I think that Without Fail [2002] would actually be my homage to Day of the Jackal, because it explicitly references Forsyth’s book. The emphasis there is placed upon the assassins planning for escape, as opposed to the [1993] Clint Eastwood/Wolfgang Peterson film, In the Line of Fire, in which the assassin knows he won’t be able to escape. As I said at the CWA Diamond Daggers ceremony, The Day of the Jackal … was Year Zero for the current generation of thriller writers; it was different, and re-set the clock, and we’ve all had to deal with it ever since. So, I didn’t mean it as a direct homage but acknowledged–for all of us, readers and writers–that Fredrick Forsyth is a giant figure, and his debut novel casts a giant shadow over the genre.
Evelyn Waugh, 101 today
Happy birthday to the late British novelist Evelyn Waugh, who was not the sweetest man to work around.
John Banville describes him as terribly sad at the end of his life. “As a man, he was quintessentially English—stubborn, class-obsessed, honorable, detached and despairing. And he was unfathomably strange.” (via Books, Inq.)
Miller’s Liebowitz Still Worth Reading
Here’s an essay of author Walter M. Miller and his classic apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz
Within the cathedral of post-apocalyptic and dystopian literature, there ought to be a small sanctum reserved for books produced out of the author’s personal experience with cataclysmic events. Other works that fit into this niche include Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” which was inspired by the writer having witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, and “The Forever War,” Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel, which drew directly on his tour of duty in Vietnam.
(via Books, Inq.)
Marilynne Robinson and American Fiction
Casey Cep wrote, “Marilynne Robinson is one of the great religious novelists, not only of our age, but any age. Reading her new novel Lila, one wonders how critics could worry that American fiction has lost its faith, though such worries make one think there might well have been wedding guests at Cana who complained about the shortage of water after witnessing the miracle with wine.” (via Alan Jacobs)
Asimov on Creativity
A 1959 essay on creativity by Issac Asimov, that has not been published, has been released by a friend at MIT. In it, Asimov talks about the origin of the theory of evolution, which he says was devised by two men independently, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.
A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.
Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)
He goes on to say a team hoping to develop great new ideas needs to become comfortable with each other and inspire each other to look forward. (via Prufrock)
The Primeval Glory of War
Janie Cheaney talks about war in the context of Andrew Peterson’s fourth book in The Wingfeather Saga. Do Christian novelists simplify and glorify it? “While most wars are wasteful and pointless, some are not. And ugly and terrifying as it is, battle seems to have an almost primeval appeal, especially to men. It’s as if they are called to find out what’s in them: savagery or heroism, unspeakable cruelty or self-sacrifice, the best or the worst.”
It’s a strong desire to live for something large. Perhaps that’s how we currently express the eternity God has set in our hearts “yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). That yearning for glory easily yields to the lust of our pride, making our desire to live for something big subservient to a desire to live a self-directed life, and in doing so we end up fighting over selfish things or for unwise causes. Lars’ latest novel, Death’s Doors
Marilynne Robinson’s Humble America
Aaron Belz offers this snapshot of Marilynne Robinson’s America, that land where the least of us can become great by the Lord’s grace:
As unpopular as it is, the Calvinist/Puritan doctrine of total depravity shares ground with the philosophes’ and founding fathers’ view of humans. Read Candide, a violent satire full of rape, bestiality, and murder designed to supplant European aristocratic classism with individualism and equality. Though Voltaire loathed organized religion and outright rejected Calvinism, he depicted the human race in a Pauline way, each misguided soul awaiting a humble revelation of its own worth. And remember that it was Thomas Hobbes, also a philosophe, who famously described human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
(via Prufrock)
Happy Birthday, Plum!
One of our favorite authors, P.G. Wodehouse, was born on this day in 1881. In honor of the day, we link to McSweeney’s for a bit of Plum parody from Rhian Jones in “P. G. Wodehouse’s American Psycho.”
I had, on the morning in question, breakfasted as usual on the old bran muffin and decaffeinated herbal tea before completing a thousand physical jerks and setting off downtown to Pierce & Pierce. Whilst performing my ablutions I’d gained the fleeting impression of there being something distinctly odd about my reflection, as if I wasn’t quite there, but I put it down to the previous evening’s indulgences at the club and paid it no mind.
Beneath the old six-button double-breasted tailcoat, I was sporting shoes by Susan Warren Bennis Edwards and some frankly tremendous trousers, which allowed me to feel inordinately pleased with myself. This happy state of affairs had of course as much likelihood of lasting as the early grace enjoyed by Milton’s Satan. I realised as much upon entering the meeting room, where I beheld my chums engaged in conversation with Paul Owen, a chap whose company I must admit I struggle at the best of times to tolerate.