reading notes

by Charles Baxter
ISBN: 9781555974732
I was impressed with Baxter’s earlier collection of essays (Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction) so I’ve been looking forward to reading this one.
One of the many things I like about reading Baxter on fiction is that he isn’t only a theorist or critic, he’s a writer, and a damn good [...]

Pictures from Previous Lives
published Winter 2002
I have a stack of old issues of Granta, most of which I have not read, but which I very much intend to read someday. Doesn’t every real reader have stacks of someday books in the house? For this particular issue, someday finally arrived a week or so ago.
It makes [...]

Essays on making things and making meaning
by Susan Neville
ISBN: 1878448080
This collection of essays turned out to be more on the philosophical side of making meaning than on the documentary side of making things. There isn’t anything wrong with that, it just wasn’t quite what I was expecting.
Neville’s focus is Indiana, and how the manufactured/manufacturing landscape [...]

by Chuck Palahniuk
ISBN: 0385722222
This collection of essays is divided into three sections: people together, portraits, and personal. The stories are gross, disturbing, full of longing, surprises, and wishes. This means they’re all about the kinds of things people do, think about, and struggle with.
I can’t imagine who else could bring together write ups of [...]

by Lawrence Weschler
ISBN: 0679777407
Weschler (Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder) writes interesting and true stories. His essays are absorbing, usually contain something of the unexpected, and reflect craftsmanship. Whether or not you think you have an interest in Vermeer’s paintings, Polanski’s films, or Hockney’s polaroids, Weschler will grab you and hold you long enough to finish [...]

Stories That Are Mostly True
by Tony Earley
ISBN: 1565123603
This book is a collection of personal essays, though Earley isn’t entirely comfortable with that description. Personal, these days, often means a “predisposition toward narcissism” and that really isn’t an attractive idea to a good writer. Also, what he wrote here doesn’t follow the definition of essay he [...]

by Jonathan Franzen
ISBN: 0312422164
Jonathan Franzen may always be known for getting himself disinvited from the Oprah show and book club. He’s a relatively young man (early forties) as authors go, and no doubt has many more books and publically-recorded “misstatements” to come, so one can’t be sure. This book, as a collection of essays, gives [...]

by Jenny Diski
ISBN: 1862072507
This is a collection of essays, most of which were written for the London Review of Books, and so masquerade as meandering book reviews. Diski sets up the reader to believe in meandering with her preface, saying that one “of the great pleasures for me of writing is starting out in the [...]

by Raymond Carver
ISBN: 39472299X
This book is a re-read for me.
Fires is a collection, and a bit of an odd one: it starts off with two essays, then has quiet a bit of poetry, then some stories, an interview from Paris Review, and an afterword Carver wrote because he thought a foreward seemed “presumptuous” of [...]

by Charles Baxter
ISBN: 1555972705
This is the sort of book that makes you want to go out and do one of two things after you read it: if you are at all inclined, it will make you think about your own fiction writing and pick up a pen or go sit at the keyboard, and if [...]