F. Scott Fitzgerald is easy to iconize. His story so neatly tracks his times: in the Twenties, he had a Jazz Age party; when America crashed, he cracked up; in the Depression, he was down and out. In The Disenchanted, Budd Schulberg’s novelization of the Scott-Zelda tale, an older, lightly fictionalized Fitzgerald is painfully aware [...]
Categories: Book Reviews
Tags: Budd Schulberg · F. Scott Fitzgerald · featured posts · The Disenchanted
Robert Olen Butler has said, The one thing that other aspiring artists have over writers is that many of them can view their mentors at work. A painter can sit at the back of a studio and watch her mentor paint, a ballet dancer can watch his mentor rehearse and perform. But you can’t really [...]
Categories: Creative Process · Writers · Writing
Tags: Charles Dickens · featured posts · How Writers Write · Little Dorrit · Robert Olen Butler
The reigning Booker Prize winner hardly needs my seal of approval, but I’ll give it anyway: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is wonderful. The bravest — and most exciting and troubling — aspect of the book is the decision to heroize Thomas Cromwell. Mantel’s Cromwell, steeled by a brutal childhood and an apprenticeship on the continent [...]
Categories: Book Reviews
Tags: featured posts · Hilary Mantel · Wolf Hall
It feels like spring in Boston this week (sunny, temps in the sixties), and the weather makes me anxious for baseball. We are several weeks into spring training, a strange limbo period when baseball is being played somewhere far off, with palm trees in the background, but it is just a rumor around here. This [...]
Categories: Sports
Tags: baseball · featured posts · Red Sox · Yankees
Last Friday at 11:00 PM I emailed the finished manuscript of my book to my agent and editor. At this point, it is hard to know how long it has taken to refine this book from the first gleam of an idea to completion. But it has been almost three years since I finished my [...]
Categories: My Books
Tags: bookthree · featured posts
In December 1839, Charles Dickens was 27 years old and already a superstar. He had written the Boz sketches, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. Each was a double sensation, scoring first as a serial — the day an installment of Nickleby was released, according to a contemporary account, the Strand “looked almost verdant with the numerous [...]
Categories: Writers
Tags: Charles Dickens · creativity · featured posts
There is a new exhibition at the Boston Public Library of the street photographs of Jules Aarons. The exhibition is located in the Wiggin Gallery in the old McKim Building, just one flight up from the main reading room where where I have been writing every day. The gallery is secluded, and you won’t find [...]
Categories: Boston · Photography
Tags: Boston Public Library · featured posts · Jules Aarons · The Strangler
I’ve just finished Dickens’ Little Dorrit and my first thought on closing the book is how big and sprawling it seems next to our own spare, miniaturist novels. Not all of today’s novels are written this way, of course, but scan the Times bestseller list and you will see that generally the Raymond Carver/New Yorker [...]
Categories: Book Reviews
Tags: Charles Dickens · featured posts · Little Dorrit
This week, the battle over Amazon’s bid to corner the market on ebook sales — to establish itself as the iTunes of digital books — seemed to turn a corner. On one side, Amazon announced Steven Covey will abandon S&S to grant ebook rights to Amazon. On the other side, a consensus began to emerge in [...]
Categories: Publishing
Tags: Amazon · ebooks · featured posts
I am reading Dickens’s Little Dorrit at the moment, inspired by the rebroadcast of the wonderful PBS/BBC mini-series. (It is being rebroadcast here in Boston, at least. I don’t know if this is true elsewhere.) At the same time I am spending endless hours, as usual, idling on the web, particularly on blogs, where a [...]
Categories: Blogging · Internet · Writing
Tags: Charles Dickens · featured posts · Little Dorrit
