Craft Notes: Paul West’s Technical Advice for Fiction Writers, Part IV

The novelist Paul West has had the greatest influence on my development as a writer. I first had the great fortune of encountering this member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of the Prix Médicis and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, Literary Lion of the New York Public Library system, and…

Craft Notes: What’s Happening?

The following is excerpted from Manifesto: Maximalist Expressionism, or "Shut/-/Up(!) Fiction". As to what transpires in my novel Flicker in the Porthole Glass, I’ve been asked point blank: Does anything happen in this novel? My answer: The novel happens in this novel. In his book of essays, For a New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet sums up…

Craft Notes: Knowing My Place

The following is excerpted from Manifesto: Maximalist Expressionism, or "Shut/-/Up(!) Fiction". A large part of the “work” my novel sets out to accomplish is to foreground the way in which self-knowledge is not an exact match for the narrative-of-self we carry around with us in our minds, a narrative subject to constant revision and emendation,…