(Source: mediabistro.com)
tagged with jonathan franzen
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The Great Gatsby was last updated in 1924. You don’t need it to be refreshed, do you? Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that’s reassuring. Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.
- Jonathan Frazen in defense of the printed book — “Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society.”
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I have a bit of an ear. Fiction writers often do.
- Jonathan Franzen, after mimicking the call of a Western Screech-Owl during a fundraiser in the Central Park West apartment of Daniel Katz and Maggie Lear.
(Source: The Wall Street Journal)
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Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
- Jonathan Franzen
(Source: Guardian)
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When I was in college, a Californian writer named Tom Farber came to visit. He read one of my stories, and when I met with him he spent our entire hour together taking apart the first page of it, questioning word choices, pointing out every unclarity and evasion of meaning, and demonstrating how a sentence is not an end point but the first step down a path of self-discovery and narrative possibility. His refrain was, “Shake it. Shake it and see what falls out.” He was talking in part about losing unnecessary words, but mainly about shaking the trees in the orchard of the imagination.
- Jonathan Franzen
(Source: writingclasses.com)
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The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms. What makes this especially strange is the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe.
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from, “Jonathan Frazen Writes About David Foster Wallace’s Suicide.”
“For a limited time, The New Yorker will give Facebook fans free access to a Jonathan Franzen essay about his relationship with the late David Foster Wallace. Follow this link to access the essay.”
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The Morning News Tournament of Books
The Tournament of Books has started!
First up: Franzen’s Freedom vs. Teddy Wayne’s Kapitoil. One of these books you have probably had boiled down and forcibly poured into your veins by the media, the other one you have probably never heard of. LET’S TAKE A WILD GUESS WHO WON THIS ONE, SHALL WE?
But everyone knows the real reason to read the TOB is for Kevin Guilfoile & John Warner’s commentary.
John: My objectivity is compromised here. I’ve worked with Teddy Wayne extensively in my editorial capacity at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He even thanks me in the acknowledgements in the back of his book. It isn’t too far off to say that in some sense, I made Teddy Wayne, particularly because I formed his body out of clay and then breathed life into him.
Plus, Jonathan Franzen once insulted my dog.
House pets are off-limits.
(Source: ecantwell)
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There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
- Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
(Source: Guardian)
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I devised a short ransom note and planned my escape route. I ran into the water…. the copy of Franzen’s book I’d helped myself to was floating away. A helicopter was flying above.
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James Fletcher, the person who tried to steal Jonathan Franzen’s glasses. Read “The Jonathan Franzen spectacle thief speaks.”
[UPDATE: Better article here.]
“Every time I start a novel, I feel I’ve never written one before. That was true the first time, and it’s felt true every time since.”
