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Call me a utopian, but I believe every entrant to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award would chuck the contest, the reality-show format, and all the tips on how to hype your book for a sense of cultural belonging. The Amazon “community” suggests a world in which everyone can publish a book, within a…

Think of the encomia of European intellectuals like Sartre and Beauvoir to the great American writers who didn’t teach, didn’t go to school, but worked as truck drivers, bartenders, nightwatchmen, stevedores, anything but intellectuals

Ironically, a preoccupation with historic catastrophe actually ends up depriving the novel of the kind of historical consciousness it was best suited to capture. The effect is particularly clear in the “maximalist” school of recent fiction, which strives, as McGurl puts it, to link “the individual …

[...] What was missing from the older literary forms, in other words, wasn’t social justice, but the passage of time—a dimension the novel was specifically engineered to capture. The novelistic hero is by definition someone whose life experience hasn’t yet been fully described, possibly because of …

I was never a creative writing major, or even an English major. At my state university—the only place that would take me—I majored in drugs, easy virtue, and skiing. Waitressing was a big part of that, too. I’ve taken exactly one writing workshop in my life. I started another but dropped it because…