Hints and tips:
...Alexandre Montagu, the lawyer, and David Bellos, the don, challenge artistic claims to originality, seek to dismantle the whole concept of “plagiarism” and gleefully insist that “a bare handful of writers...
...“Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon,” he continues. Reading this, one might ask, “And what is human nature?”...
...That doesn’t mean we don’t deserve salvation, even if that salvation consists only of having our voices heard....
...“I don’t like sitting around, I like to be useful,” father Evdokimos smiles, unruly eyebrows dancing above rimless glasses. He wears his age, cassock, and venerable status lightly....
...I don’t think that I’m the only person to have been captivated by Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These....
...I don’t like being asked this myself as I never know how to answer it. Happiness is so fragile that talking about it tends to destroy it. But many volunteered an answer anyway....
...I don’t envy brain surgeons, world-saving environmental activists or Oscar-winning actors (much), but on the occasion when a colleague does publish a bestselling novel, writes a debut feature for the New...
...“All-out war on climate change made sense when only as long as it was winnable,” says Franzen....
...Rufus Franzen, a 17-year-old student who is part of the Berlin pupil council, a representative body for local school children, feels the same way....
...The Silence, by Don DeLillo, Picador, RRP£14.99, 128 pages This article has been amended since original publication to correct a quotation in which DeLillo references “plague”....
...When Ms Swann announced her departure from SSP, she justified her pay, saying: “I created a couple of billion [of pounds] for shareholders and I don’t think I’ve received quite a couple of billion.”...
...“Don’t Stand So Close to Me” for the gang rape? Really?...
...Kathy Franzen was the CFO of Giorgio Beverly Hills while I was the company’s corporate cash manager. This was the mid ’80s, and it was definitely still a man’s world....
...“As a seducer, he was hampered by ambivalence,” Jonathan Franzen wrote of Chip Lambert, the era’s ur-protagonist, in The Corrections (2001)....
...I don’t have any hope that we can stop the change from coming....
...Whether or not you care for his novels (I don’t, especially), he built the ivory tower from which he looks down at the world....
...True, there is an Oakland section in Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. But then the story moves to Germany....
...You don’t have to be mad to dance here . . ....
...He said recently: “Today, men tend to think that if they dress younger, they are going to look younger, but they don’t, it’s the opposite effect.”...
...That’s why my books don’t have 600 pages. What books are currently on your bedside table?...
...“I don’t know what ‘middlebrow’ even means....
...Formerly a properties-of-the-medium kind of writer, a disciple of Don DeLillo and other, older American postmodernists, Franzen reinvented himself with his third novel, The Corrections (2001), as someone...
...By that stage some of the biggest names in world fiction had already been passed over, with Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Edna O’Brien, Dave Eggers, Rose Tremain and Thomas Keneally...
...This sounds delightfully humble coming from the 31-year-old tycoon, but I don’t believe it for a moment....
...I don’t want to escape the world around me to write a novel about heroism, or to write something about someone who went through incredible hardship....
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