Vidal’s Wildean Oates

Vidal’s Wildean Oates

Christopher Hitchens’s piece on Gore Vidal in the February issue of Vanity Fair, “Vidal Loco”, is a fair if sad account of the decline into irrelevance of a once-influential and provocative American voice (Vidal was occasionally referred to as a...

The dirt on the publishing slush pile

Any writer aspiring to publication should read this sobering but, in my view, accurate analysis in The Guardian of ‘The Death of the Slush Pile’. The slush pile – that generic term for the stream of unsolicited submissions that arrive at publishing...

Asking writers about writing

Here’s a thoughtful piece from retired Washington Post literary editor Bob Thompson.  In “Writing about Writers” he recounts having to interview Joan Didion about her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking – three days after her daughter...

The joy of rewriting

Just came across this ode to rewriting from A L Kennedy of The Guardian. She wishes, as I do, that there were a more appetising word for what she describes as the “glorious” work involved in rewriting your prose. No one can teach you how to write, or how...
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