“I start in longhand and I write notes and messages and exaltations to myself… A ring-bound A4 green notebook, black ink always — and I press medium-hard.”
(Source: Guardian)
tagged with novelist
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“That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.”
-Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist
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Two Debut Novelists on the 2011 Booker Shortlist
Keep plugging away, people. The shortlist (debut novelists bolded):
- The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
- Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch
- The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
- Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
- Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman (excerpt)
- Snowdrops by A.D. Miller (Staff Pick)
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To me, it’s a beautiful thing that readers so distant and different can connect with a book of mine. It’s like sending out thousands of letters, and little by little receiving replies you never expected. I guess some readers in the U.S. or in France want to confirm some prior idea they had about Chile or about Latin America. But books aren’t made to confirm ideas; they’re made to refute them, to question them, to put other images out there where we thought everything had already been said.
- Alejandro Zambra, named one of Granta magazine’s “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” in 2010. His third novel, Formas de volver a casa comes out in May.
(Source: themillions.com)
