The Butterfly Lures Us Not

Very Bright Teeth As Big And Orderly As Piano Keys.

It's True That The Young Who Now Flock To Script Writing, Or Producing And Directing, To Fulfill The Demands Of These New Devices Would, In An Earlier Period, Have Been Submitting To Magazines And Working On Their First Novels. But Even In The Midst Of All These "digital Products," The Wonder Of It Is That There Are Still So Many Young Writers Who Continue To Believe In The Venerable Print Novel As The Corridor To Fame And Fortune.

I Read In Order To Write. I Read Out Of Obsession With Writing.

If Ideas Are What Feed Serious Literature And Arresting Language, Who Today Is Writing A Novel Of Ideas (which Can Often Mean Comedy)? I Think Of Joshua Cohen. Who Else?

Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are Not Found To Be Likable. Is Raskolnikov Likable? Is King Lear? The Plethora Of Such Naive Readers Testifies To A Failure Of Imagination - The Capacity To See Into Unfamiliar Lives, Motives, Feelings - And This Failure Must, At Least In Part, Be The Failure Of The Teaching Of Literature In The Schools.