Here’s a fun audio interview with Brad Thor, author of Full Black, Foreign Influence, and other thrillers. He talks about his books a little and how writers must write (for one thing) and focus on what they love to read.
Category Archives: Authors
Tolstoy at Rest
Discovering the Diary of Anne Frank
Mike Williams has the story on how Judith Jones, who became a famous senior editor and vice president at Knopf, pulled the French translation of The Diary of a Young Girl off of the reject pile and urged her boss to send it to New York for consideration.
Shakespeare Wasn't Shakespeare As Such
Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge has an interesting show on Shakespeare, modern poetry, and language here. Of note, Arthur Phillips talks about imitating Shakespeare by writing in a Shakespearean style. He says he didn’t think Shakespeare was thought to be the greatest English playwright during his lifetime or even many years afterward. He said he may have been thought to be about as good as another playwright whose work we’ve lost entirely.
A Day Job Helps Your Writing
Alexis Grant, a journalist working on a travel memoir on the side, has a good list on why a writer should keep a day job.
Reading by Familiar Setting
Scientist and author Tali Sharot likes to read books from places she’s familiar with. She likes The Easter Parade by Richard Yates, because it’s placed in New York. In this interview with the Boston Globe, she describes her reading habits. It’s nice to see people dropping books they are no longer interested in.
Philip Roth Gives Up on Fiction
Author Philip Roth received the Man Booker International Award for Fiction today. The Financial Times of the United Kingdom reports Roth has won every important American fiction award during his 50-year career.
Now, he tells the Times he has “wised up” and stopped reading fiction. No further explanation.
Plagiarism: "A Major Academic Mistake"
A local Christian college president has resigned after news that he plagiarized a chapter of his book. The Board of Directors did not ask him to step down. He took that on himself. Perhaps it’s an honorable move, but his explanation leaves me with doubt. He said he did not understand copyright laws at the time, and that it was “a major academic mistake.” The minister whose work was copied is quoted saying, “He told me that he had read my book in college, liked it, and was under the impression that I had passed away or that it was no longer in print when he used it.”
The former president said he tried to give proper credit to the minister in most recent editions by adding the minister’s photo and contact information to the front of the book. “There was not a cover up,” he said, “and I was planning on re-writing that section of the book anyway.”
How does any of this justify taking someone else’s published words as your own?
Ray Bradbury on His Perspective and Critics
From The Paris Review interview last year with author Ray Bradbury:
Q: There was a time, though, wasn’t there, when you wanted recognition across the board from critics and intellectuals?
BRADBURY: Of course. But not anymore. If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past—a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic. … It’s the terrible creative negativism, admired by New York critics, that caused [Vonnegut’s] celebrity. New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.
Literature vs. Trash
“Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of the utterance. A political speech may be, and sometimes is, literature; a sonnet to the moon may be, and often is, trash. Style is what distinguishes literature from trash,” writes Evelyn Waugh, and he backs it up too. This link is particularly relevant to our blog because I posted a G.M.Hopkins poem to the moon earlier this week.