Chris Barsanti's Blog
September 30, 2025
Screening Room: ‘Play Dirty’
I reviewed Play Dirty, which is starting on Amazon Prime tomorrow, for Slant Magazine: Donald Westlake’s Parker character, who he wrote about in many books under his penname Richard Stark, is a clever yet nasty machine of a criminal with a preternatural drive. That alone makes for a compelling screen character. But his brutishness doesn’t …
September 28, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Lie Well
When being interviewed by The Paris Review (as all the greats were, once upon a time), John Cheever was asked about how to be true to reality in fiction. His response: It seems to me that falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance …
September 22, 2025
Reader’s Corner: ‘Murderland’
I reviewed Caroline Fraser’s new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlist in the Time of Serial Killers for the Fall 2025 edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books: We don’t live in a time when a single book can create a galvanizing moment, but if we did, Caroline Fraser’s Murderland could be a Silent Spring for …
September 21, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Two Pages a Day
S.E. Hinton was just eighteen years old when her first novel, The Outsiders, was published. Though in some ways a dream come true, having that kind of success so young proved daunting. While in college, Hinton was hit with writer’s block. She thought she needed to produce another masterpiece, she told Writer’s Digest. “And I …
September 14, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Ignore This Advice
Richard Bausch (editor of multiple Norton anthologies) has spent his time in the trenches of literary academia and seen the number of how-to books on writing proliferate while the number of readers keeps falling. His advice for those aspiring to life of the pen? Put the manuals and the how-to books away. Read the writers themselves, whose …
September 11, 2025
Screening Room: ‘Orwell: 2+2=5’
The new documentary from Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) just had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. I reviewed the film for The Playlist: Everyone has their own George Orwell and tends to think everyone else gets him wrong. As such, making a sprawling quasi-biographical documentary like “Orwell: 2+2=5” is a brave effort …
September 7, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Procrastinate Well
Finding ways not to write is a skill shared by all in the profession. But what if there was a way to delay your work productively? Miranda July has an idea: It’s best to procrastinate with other things I don’t want to do. The amount of business emails and household chores I’ve gotten done while …
August 31, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Make It Make Sense
Canadian author Miriam Toews (Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows) lost both her father and her sister Marjorie to suicide. She was not sure the loss was something she could ever write about. “I had no words,” she told Kristen Martin. But then after a couple of years, Toews had a realization: No, I’m a …
August 24, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Only You Can Do It
The author Geoff Dyer, who writes everything from fiction to criticism and essays on tennis, has a ritual he enacts before starting a new book. He pens a note to himself which reads, “Write a book that no one else could write“: I think one of the features of nonfiction today is that, to a …
August 17, 2025
Writer’s Desk: Pure Writing
Per novelist and theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet: The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.
