novels | The Smart Set

Read like a guest, not like a tourist!

ENG 310 — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 01:20:09 +0000

Every time you pick up a novel from another country, you open the door to a new journey. You might discover new (to you!) foods and customs, pick up a few phrases in a foreign language, or gain a new perspective on something you thought you understood. If you are fluent in English — a […]

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Sounds of Silence

Matthew Duffus — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 11:30:58 +0000

It didn’t happen all at once. I didn’t wake up one morning to find myself unable to write creatively. For months, I could eke out a story or group of poems, but all attempts at another novel arrived stillborn, exhausting themselves after a few thousand words. My father suggested I had a form of postpartum depression, that seeing my first novel […]

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The Other Side of the Net

Andrew Varnon — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 11:07:52 +0000

“Hey,” I say, and pause for a moment, slinging my tennis bag over my shoulder and closing the car door. I start down the grassy slope toward the tennis court. It is my opponent I have called out to, inside the fence. I swing the gate open and let it clang behind me. Now, I […]

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Novel Politics

Kelly Cherry — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 11:30:57 +0000

I do not say that the novel must be, or more often than not is, political. But where there are characters, the political may be found. A writer chooses to accent, plunge into, or ignore the political, but characters insist upon liking or disliking something that is happening or has happened or may happen. In […]

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Why Read Novels?

Elisa Gabbert — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 11:30:01 +0000

There’s a David Shields quote that I have encountered multiple times, first in his own book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and most recently in “Note to Self” by Elaine Blair, a review of the work (both written and editorial) of John D’Agata, subtitled “The lyric essay’s convenient fictions.” Both D’Agata and Shields are proponents of […]

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Writing and Whistle-Blowing

Morgan Meis — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 16:12:43 +0000

George Orwell was not a political thinker, exactly. Sure, he wrote books like 1984 and Animal Farm. Those books are political. Or better put, they are political thought experiments in novel form. Orwell liked to think about totalitarianism. He created fictional scenarios like 1984 in order to think through the logic of totalitarianism, to find […]

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Taking Flight

Morgan Meis — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:12:43 +0000

A novel is a bird. I learned this from Jonathan Franzen. It is the underlying message of his newest collection of essays, Farther Away. Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen. 336 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26. Franzen became a bird watcher many years ago. He is almost apologetic about that fact, realizing that — in […]

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The Posthumous Star

Jessa Crispin — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:12:43 +0000

We know the story. Van Gogh died having only sold one painting during his lifetime. He was a mad creative genius — our favorite kind — cutting off his ear and giving it to a prostitute. Then, tragically, a suicide, perhaps bereft at the cold reception his work received, so that he never knew how […]

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The Eco Chamber

Paula Marantz Cohen — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:12:43 +0000

As someone familiar with the publishing industry, I know that one of its edicts is that a novel protagonist should be in some way likeable — if not likable to begin with, at least eventually so, and if not on the outside then there should lie buried some vestige of humanity that the reader can […]

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