The Art of Fiction No. 221
The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami (Published 2011)
nytimes.com
We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? Wha
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
incessant radical change, is not describable in a language that assumes continuity and a common experience of life.
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
Suddenly, the potential for fiction as a vital force in the world felt unlimited. It could be everything: the most effective mode of mind-to-mind communication ever devised, a powerful form of entertainment, in the highest sense of that word. I suppose part of me had been wondering if the short story was going to be enough—enough for my grandiose a
... See more