Kafka, Proust, James Joyce: just a few of many authors who preferred to write through the night. While you’re not going to pen the next Ulysses simply by starting after nightfall, there is new evidence to suggest that sleepy brains think more freely — and that…
The spirit of Félix Fénéon lives on. Remember Luc Sante‘s brilliant 2007 translation of his faits divers? Novels in Three Lines collected the French anarchist and art critic’s beautifully and hilariously condensed reporting of true crimes and happenings in Le Monde newspaper in 1906. A selection: With…
The internet is atwitter over the findings of the newest VIDA survey, which looked at the representation of “Women In Literary Arts” and found, once again, that things are far from equal at the most prestigious magazines, especially at outlets like Harper’s, The Atlantic, The…
Anne Frank is alive and well. That’s the premise in Shalom Auslander‘s new novel Hope: A Tragedy, where Frank is old, uncouth, and typing away in the attic of a farmhouse. Frank is “alive” in a more figurative fashion in Nathan Englander‘s short-story collection What We Talk About When…
Should your best friends also be cruel? At The Guardian, Lars Iyer (Spurious, Dogma) praises the frenemy in literature and in life: “‘In your friend you should possess your best enemy’, Nietzsche writes. What a remarkable thing to say! This is a concept of friendship radically different…
“I predict,” writes novelist Rex Pickett (Sideways), “in less than 10 years time, the traditional publishing industry, now moribund and flailing like a bird on broken wings, will be dead, or will morph into something almost totally unrecognizable from what it was for a century.” Prognostications…
“The Fallback Plan” is a weekly column at The Faster Times written by Leigh Stein (author of the novel The Fallback Plan), that offers advice to those undergoing a second adolescence. For an illustrated fallback plan of your own, write to Leighstein@thefastertimes.com. Anyone whose question is answered…
‘Cult favourite’ has always been a loaded term in publishing: it conjures up a devoted fan-base, but is often code for ‘crap sales’. There was an interesting analysis of what it means to be pigeonholed as a cult author in El Pais over the weekend. Some prominent names —…
Circa 167 B.C., the Roman playwright Publius Terentius Afer is said to have said “Nothing is said that has not been said before.” He probably wasn’t the first person to make this statement, and he certainly wasn’t the last. The feeling that language and writing continually fails to…
John Waters, in this interview at The Financial Times, claims to be regretful about how gay culture has gone mainstream: I miss it … I’m for gay marriage. I don’t want to do it, but I certainly think people should be allowed to, and I wouldn’t vote for anybody…
