Reality Hunger: A Crash Course via the Epigraphs
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has three epigraphs: "Art is theft" (Picasso), "All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one" (Walter Benjamin), and "When we are not sure, we are...
View ArticleWhere Do Books Come From?
My new book, How Literature Saved My Life, was published by Knopf a little more than a month ago, and as I've been traveling around the country talking about it, a lot of people have asked me how the...
View ArticleFifty-Two-Card Pickup
In my previous blog post, "Where Do Books Come From?", I talked in a general way about how I moved from my first novel, Heroes, to my second novel, Dead Languages, and in today's post, I'm going to...
View Article“Fuck the Game If It Ain’t Sayin’ Nothin’”– Public Enemy
Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity was my first work of nonfiction — the first work in which I forged a form that felt entirely "my own" and in which my voice felt unmistakably my...
View ArticleThe Thing about Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Bored
So I wrote some books that used sports to get at larger questions, I hope, of race, vicariousness, masculinity, and American mythology, but I was wearying of writing about sports; I was still following...
View ArticleHow Literature Did, More or Less, Save My Life
Heavily under the influence of self-reflexive documentary film (esp. Ross McElwee) and anthropological autobiography (esp. Renata Adler and George W. S. Trow) and monologuists (Eric Bogosian, Spalding...
View ArticleA Very Partial Reading List
I recently heard someone say that if a writer doesn't investigate uncomfortable places within himself, why would he bother writing? All great books wind up with their authors getting their teeth bashed...
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