For and Against Interpretation: Reading A.S. Byatt
“These protagonists (some, not all) end up throwing over a form of knowing characterized by skepticism in favor of an inchoate and yet much more real sense of what is true and meaningful—perhaps the very sense that experiences and words can be true and meaningful.”
In the second essay of her travelogue trilogy about reading Turkish novels in Istanbul, Helen Stuhr-Rommereim discovers black magic and cultural collision in Letife Tekin’s DEAR SHAMELESS DEATH.
Two coming-of-age novels take us to the middle of nowhere.
The (Re)birth of the Author: derek beaulieu’s Experimental Poetics
beaulieu’s recent work, which encompasses visual poetry, graphic “translations” of other literary works, and conceptual or process-based prose, hardly presents a unified front. It is, however, bound together by its persistence in forcing the use of scare quotes around the word “writing”, in imagining alternative ways of creating and reading literature.
I found these books and these authors because I needed their voices, although I don’t know that I’ve ever articulated that to myself before. I needed to see women writing other women, women on the page who were strong, thoughtful, harrowingly flawed and courageous in facing and exploring their own selves – if a little batty.
In the first of a trilogy of essays about reading Turkish literature in Istanbul, Helen Stuhr-Rommereim takes Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s novel A MIND AT PEACE as her travel guide through the city.
On Escapism: Nicholas Nickleby
Like today’s television-watchers, who schedule activities around their favorite shows, the nineteenth-century’s novel-readers no doubt experienced a sense of delayed gratification and of belonging to an excited group of followers.
“The two memoirs offer generous windows into a time period that is commonly mythologized but often remains inscrutable.”
Confessions of a Literary Aggregator
In February I started fictiondaily.org as a response to Ted Genoways’s claim in Mother Jones that fiction is dead. In the comments section of the essay editors, readers, and writers of fiction online responded fervently: fiction is very much alive! It’s all online!