Activity

Otto turned for the waiter, whom he’d been having trouble reaching since they sat down. He’d brought her to a small restaurant which, with excess of garlic in everything but dessert and coffee (though it lingered even there), and very dry martini cocktails served by disdainfully subservient waiters…

The books that have had the greatest impact on my life are not the ones that entertained me the most—rather, they’re the ones I’ve had to endure. Ulysses wasn’t a “good read”—it was a project, a mission, a brief military stint undertaken by a strong-willed, idealistic youth. It was a labor to car…

The books that have had the greatest impact on my life are not the ones that entertained me the most—rather, they’re the ones I’ve had to endure. Ulysses wasn’t a “good read”—it was a project, a mission, a brief military stint undertaken by a strong-willed, idealistic youth. It was a labor to car…

Here the past, yet again, proves valuable. In 1898 Tolstoy defined art as “that human activity which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others by certain external signs the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” This is c…

The inherent amateurishness of the novel, of its writers and implied readers alike, seems vital in this. Not that no authors relied on writing novels to make a living; obviously many did and do. But (as the fictional novelist Bill Gray remarked in Mao II) the novel was essentially a democratic form…