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Monthly Archives: January 2015
“That was my mistake.”
Some memoirs resemble novels — they build a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. The challenge for the writer is to make it interesting for readers who already know the ending. In the case of Truth & … Continue reading
Posted in memoir
Tagged Ann Patchett, learned, Memoir, premature death, Truth & Beauty
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“Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.”
This is the first line of a poem by Billy Collins, who believes the “signature” of a poem is its tone. In an interview with George Plimpton for the Paris Review, Collins said, “The basis of trust for a reader … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged Aimless Love, authority, Billy Collins, humorous, popular poetry, tone
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“It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail.”
This beautiful novel could be a “how to” manual for aspiring writers. It shows how to have a virtuous central character who is interesting — a rare feat in contemporary literature. It shows how to structure a novel without using … Continue reading
“The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination, as your imagination limits the world.”
This is the third of six volumes of memoir about the world and the imagination of Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s a new kind of writing that defies categorization and is driven be the desire to explore the truth. For Knausgaard, … Continue reading
Posted in memoir
Tagged anguish, Imagination, Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, sensitive, truth
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