Deviant Lives, with Carmen Maria Machado (A Book Review of ‘Her Body and Other Parties’)
I picked up Carmen Maria Machado’s book of short stories Her Body and Other Parties (Amazon | Indiebound) after seeing it on the National Book Awards shortlist for fiction. The title first drew me. I looked up to see who Machado was and found she’s a queer Latinx (yes!), which made me want to read her work…
Writing to Live, Living to Write
There was a time when I was seriously obsessed with the lives of writers: I read accounts of how they spent their time, I did a lot of research to find out who their influences were and I swore to see every documentary there is detailing their lives. I wanted to know everything about them…
Writing as Magic, with Stephen King
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. (Stephen King) If there was ever a finer book on writing, it would have to be Stephen King’s On Writing:…
A Different Way of Looking, with Marcel Proust and Alain de Botton
What I know of Marcel Proust: nada. What I know of Alain de Botton: quite a lot, although not personally, but enough for me to dive deep into one of his books, How Proust Can Change Your Life (Shop your local indie bookstore). One of the things that I’ve truly been enamored with Proust/de Botton’s compendium…