Robin Becker is a take-no-prisoners sort of writer. She’s unafraid of zombies, and even if I thought her original subtitle for Brains (see below) to be superior–”A Zomoir”–she knows when to change tracks. Thus, her entry for #AuthorFail is the rare instance where one’s agent (rare enough, perhaps) asks for the manuscript one wishes had [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Nabokov’
Dante 2020-3: Cleansing as Carnival, Tree as Anchor.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Beatrice, Dante, Dante's Inferno, Divine Comedy, Earthly Paradise, Eunoe, Lethe, Lolita, Lucifer, Nabokov, Nimrod, Purgatorio, Purgatory, Salvador Dalí, terza rime, William Blake on January 16, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Twice in recent days, I’ve posted stages in a developing idea about Dante’s Divine Comedy. The work is coming up on its 700th birthday, yet its impact seems greater than ever, and we have to ask why. My own answer appeared first, in different form, in Southwest Review. Now, we climb towards salvation, led on [...]
Tiny Shocks: Uncovering the Reductive Plot of James Wood’s How Fiction Works
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, Breathless (1960), Breathless (1983), Chekhov, Cthulhu, Curtis White, Flaubert, G.I. Joe, Hamlet, Henry James, How Fiction Works, James Wood, Jean Luc Godard, Jean-François Lyotard, John Gardner, John Ruskin, Last Tango in Paris, Les Carabiniers, Madame Bovary, Nabokov, ostranenie (enstrangement), Saul Bellow, The 400 Blows, The Concept of Character in Fiction, The Middle Mind, Theodore Adorno, Theory of Prose, Three Blondes and Death, Tripticks, Viktor Shklovsky, Watchmen, William H. Gass, Yuriy Tarnawsky on January 31, 2010 | 40 Comments »
On January 22, I read Shya Scanlon’s post “The Dull King”; on January 25 I read his second post “Cover Your Tracks.” Both were about reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Before that I’d heard of James Wood but hadn’t read anything by him; I knew some people liked him and some didn’t like him. [...]
Cover your tracks
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Balzac, finger print, Flaubert, free indirect style, James Wood, Nabokov on January 25, 2010 | 32 Comments »
I’m (still) reading How Fiction Works, by James Wood. The entire book is built around a concept he calls “free indirect style,” which essentially refers to a prose style for which Gustave Flaubert is largely responsible. One of the hallmarks of this style is that the language is most often experienced by the reader to [...]
Dmitri Nabokov 1, Dying Wish 0
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Augustus, Brod, deathbed requests, Depp, Dickens, Dickinson, Kafka, Nabokov, Thompson, Virgil, Zumas on October 17, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Vladimir Nabokov made his wife promise to burn his unfinished last novel, The Original of Laura, upon his death. But the manuscript, written on 138 index cards, remained in a Swiss safe-deposit box for over three decades. His son and sole heir, Dmitri, 75, has finally decided to let the world have a look. Knopf [...]
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