Recommended reading: On Pandering/ Claire Vaye Watkins

Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories.

Orhan Pamuk on his new novel "A Strangeness In My Mind"

A novel, for me, is an excuse to pin down, collect, and put together all the little things about daily life that I like writing about.

In India initial print run of commercial fiction is 1,00,000!

"20 years ago we couldn’t have dreamt of the numbers that commercial fiction sells these days, initial print runs of 1,00,000; Indian authors dominating bestseller lists in the country. There’s enough reason to celebrate."

Really?

Kevin Barry on research in fiction writing

Sometimes the best research happens when you don’t even know you’re doing it, when you’re just going through your day-to-day life. But it can take a long, long time for it to filter into the fiction.

Read an excerpt from a new biography of Marcel Proust

Proust, Dreyfus, and the Art of True Impressions

Karl Ove Knausagaard reviews Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Submission’

The disillusioned gaze sees through everything, sees all the lies and the pretenses we concoct to give life meaning, the only thing it doesn’t see is its own origin, its own driving force. But what does that matter as long as it creates great literature, quivering with ambivalence, full of longing for meaning, which, if none is found, it creates itself?

Kevin Barry wins the Goldsmiths prize 2015 for Beatlebone

'Beatlebone is a novel that takes its reader to the edge – of the Western world, of sanity,of fame, of words. But it also takes us to the very edge of the novel form, where it meets its notorious doppelgänger, autobiography.

Instapoets: making a career of poetry

If I think it, I write it, and if I write it, I put it out there.

Recommended reading:Fiction tells a truth that History cannot

On being mentored by Breyten Breytenbach and Paul Bowles.

Philip Pullman on J.R.R. Tolkien,

Tolkien’s work has very little of interest in it to a reader of literature, in my opinion. When I think of literature—Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad—the great novelists found their subject matter in human nature, emotion, in the ways we relate to each other. If that’s what Tolkien’s up to, he’s left out half of it. The books are wholly male-oriented. The entire question of sexual relationships is omitted.

Recommended reading: Bartleby The Scrivener/ Herman Melville (digitized version):

 Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby The Scrivener.”digitized and annotated by Slate.

They call it “a searing critique of American capitalism, a protest story, an existentialist paean to the necessity of going on in an absurd world.”

Bartleby is the character who coined the phrase, “I would prefer not to.”

Egyptian Novelist Ahmed Nagy faces criminal charge for his novel excerpt

Set in Cairo, the novel tells the story of Bassam, a man lost

 inside a "spiderweb of emotional frustration and failure."

 Oscillating between the present, the past and the future, it

 explicitly describes sexual acts.

Mohsin Hamid on cyborg era

TIme is our most precious currency. So significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.