A WRITER'S WIT Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual. ​Rita Mae Brown ​Born November 28, 1944

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Alain Pilon

“A landscape of rocks evokes a time before time, and the end-times as well, forcing us, while contemplating it, to live in all time at once, where words have nothing to attach themselves to” (81).

“‘That is what rocks express. Though they are otherwise meaningless, they are, in this respect, the most meaningful thing we have, putting us in touch with oblivion. Which is the ineffablest thing of all’” (81).

A WRITER'S WIT Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.  ​Voltaire ​Born November 21, 1694

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Jessica Roux

     “For a minute, she lets herself imagine the larger sinkhole below the baby one opening very slowly and cupping her and the house and the dog and the piano all the way down to the very black bottom of the limestone hollow and gently depositing them there so far down that nobody could get her out, they could only visit, her family’s heads peering once in a while over the lip, tiny pale bits against the blue sky.
     From down there, everyone would seem so happy” (83)

A WRITER'S WIT Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them. ​Allen Tate ​Born November 19, 1899

My book World

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late British-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the twenty-third in a series of twenty-four.

​“The beginning of October is a joyful, hopeful, inspiring time of the year for me—it always has been. For me, born so late in the summer, autumn is my spring. This is the season which I associate with fresh work-projects in their earliest, most creative phase—the phase of discovering what the project is really about, rather than how I can execute it” (8).
 
“Since 1973, I’ve been gradually reading through the Marchand edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals, volume by volume, as they are published. Now I’ve nearly finished volume nine, which covers October 1821 to September 1822” (15).
 
“There are students who are doing term-papers or these about my work or the work of my friends. They expect me to drop everything and answer pages of questions, instead of themselves looking for the answers in the library. All right, I sympathize with their laziness. But, too often, they make the crudest of all mistakes; they think they can flatter me into helping them by claiming, ‘I’ve read everything you’ve written’—a statement which could only be true of maybe twenty people in the Unites States” (17). And I’m now one of those twenty (surely more by now)! Frankly, I wouldn’t tell an author such a thing but would hope my questions or our discussion would reflect that I had read all his books.

A WRITER'S WIT Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people? ​Karen Armstrong ​Born November 14, 1944

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Larry Towell / Magnum

“A window was the border through which death was possibly likeliest to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside was a spot potentially in the crossfire” (71).

“Nadia, who had not considered the order of their departure until that moment, and realized that there were risks to each, to going first and to going second, did not argue but approached the door, and drawing close she was struck by its darkness, its opacity, the way that it did not reveal what was on the other side and also did not reflect what was on this side, and so felt equally like a beginning and an end, and she turned to Saeed and found him staring at her, and his face was full of worry and sorrow, and she took his hands in hers and held them tight, and then, releasing them, and without a word, she stepped through” (76-7).

A WRITER'S WIT It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis. ​Damon Galgut ​Born November 12, 1963

My Book World

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late British-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the twenty-second in a series of twenty-four.

A WRITER'S WIT I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.  Helen Garner ​Born November 7, 1942

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Kristian Hammerstad