Entries Tagged as 'featured posts'

Man Out of Time: “The Disenchanted” by Budd Schulberg

June 30, 2010

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
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Dickens’ Outlines

March 29, 2010

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
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“Wolf Hall”

March 23, 2010

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
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Baseball’s Yankee Problem

March 18, 2010

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
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Done!

March 9, 2010

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
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A Lesson from Dickens

February 12, 2010

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
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The Street Photography of Jules Aarons

February 2, 2010

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
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“Little Dorrit”: Dickens’ Teeming World

January 26, 2010

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
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The View from Below: A midlist author watches the ebook wars

December 20, 2009

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
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Dickens vs. the Snarks

December 16, 2009

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
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