Lauren Oyler – Fake Accounts

Condemned out of her own mouth.

In a fairly unenthusiastic review of Jia Tolentino’s book of essays Trick Mirror in the LRB of January 2020, Lauren Oyler says,

What seems evident to me is that public writing is always at least a little bit self-interested, demanding, controlling and delusional, and that it’s the writer’s responsibility to add enough of something else to tip the scales away from herself.

John Burnside: The Night Ferry

Hermann Hesse – The Glass Bead Game

Whenever we read a book we bring ourselves to it; our whole lives, experiences, prejudices, views, our place in the world. I cannot avoid the fact that I am a woman born in a country that is relatively free, but where women have had to struggle to earn equal wages to men for the same work, and where they are still struggling to break through the glass ceiling in employment and to combat sexism in many other areas.

Kyle Perry: The Bluffs

A. N. Wilson – The Healing Art

A N Wilson is a tricky writer; one who publicly changes his views and who some regard as deliberately provocative and contrarian. He can be ruthless in his critiques of the works of other authors. Of Richard Adam’s Watership Down  he said, ‘I thought it was possibly the worst thing I had ever read.’ and of Bevis Hillier’s biography of John Betjeman, ‘a hopeless mishmash of a book.‘

The Madman’s Library

“It was all too easy,” he said. “It all went too smoothly. America, you sit there, you plump beauty, still buying neckties from sidewalk sharpies, still guessing which walnut shell contains the pea… America, I sometimes worry about you.”

Dickon Edwards – Where are You Now?

 

Last night I was relaxing with one of my favourite podcasts, Backlisted (thank you for the recommendation Jacqui). The discussion was about Angus Wilson’s first novel Hemlock and After, which I read many years ago. But before they even got to the discussion of the novel I was alerted to the voice of a very confident young(ish) man introduced as Dickon Edwards who has been described by the Centre for Life Writing Research at Kings College London as the author of the longest running on-line diary.

Ruth Ware: One By One