To Figure Out What Your Set of Two or Three Things is

Some people do beautiful nature descriptions. They write great dialogue. They do a really intense neurotic voice. There’s a million different skills that people might turn out to have. So I think part of it is to write enough when you’re young to figure out what your set of two or three things is.

- George Saunders

Would you buy "A Poetics Of Fiction"?

It's of course a lucrative idea to write a book for aspiring writers who are swarming the physical and cyber spaces across the world and are ready to spend fortunes for their success. But here is a book with atrocious title "A Poetics of Fiction". 400 pages. Six chapters. Title of Chapter One :Open your savings account.

Quratulain Haider:Undisputed Queen of Urdu Literature

The Nation (Pakistan) has an interesting article on Quratulain Haider, arguably the most powerful writer of Urdu Literature.

Although never very vocal about it, Ainee was a feminist through and through. She lived a very independent life on her own terms. Ainee was a working woman all her life.

Karl Ove Knausgaard on novel writing

When the novel becomes a mask it can be very entertaining, possibly even providing some insight, but it doesn’t come close to life. It doesn’t live.

A Page Is well written when...

A page is well written when the labour and pleasure of truthful narration supplant any other concern, including a concern with formal elegance. I belong to the category of writers who throw out the final draft and keep the rough when this practice ensures a higher degree of authenticity.
--Elena Ferrante

All You Wanted to Know about Gabriel Gearcia Marquez

The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Don DeLillo understands terrorism better than any political expert/political acdemic?

In Aljazeera America, Scott Beauchamp has an interesting observation:

A better guide to the subtleties of terrorism than proclamations of military experts or political academics can be found in the fiction of Don DeLillo. Besides reminding us that terrorism isn’t particularly new — or particular to Muslims, for that matter — the settings in which his novels are based give a sense of the zeitgeist in which he was working. This is the context in which he still works and in which we all live.

Svetlana Alexievich's Nobel Lecture

" Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it has recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I'm interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history.

Recommended Reading: Why does Indian writing in English still have to defend itself against charges of siding with oppressors?

Why does Indian writing in English still have to defend itself against charges of siding ...

"There has to be a way for English writing to live along with writing in other Indian languages. This will require greater humility on the part of those of us who write in English, and on the part of the complex of publishers and retailers who support the process."

Gabriel Josipovici Quotes

**When all public responses are not just negative but dismissive it’s sometimes hard to keep going. We are not Buddhists, we need some sense that what we are doing is more than self-indulgence. But of course in the end we go on writing because we have to/want to. (David Plante once said to me: ‘Remember, Gabriel, no-one asked you to do this.’ More wise words.) I have now accepted that I will always only appeal to a very small section of readers, anyway in this country, but probably everywhere, but I have also come to feel in the last few years (not in the eighties and nineties) that there is a growing body of people for whom my writing really matters, and that is heart-warming and encourages me to keep going.

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.