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…
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,…
The following is excerpted from Manifesto: Maximalist Expressionism, or "Shut/-/Up(!) Fiction". In his afterword to Paul West’s novel Tenement of Clay, critic Bill Marx quotes West on the nature of his narratives (what Marx refers to, somewhat irritatingly, as West’s “streams of dreams”). These narratives, West said, “...which appear to be the voices of those…
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…
Years ago I took my first writing course, an undergraduate intro fiction offering taught by a high-strung, tenured loon whose own aspirations as a playwright had burned out along with his ability to comport himself civilly in social situations. His over-the-top insistence on a kind of Victorian propriety, combined with his inability to suppress his…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 