Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 23
May 14, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Try, Try, and Try Again
Rejection letters are the worst. Even the ones that do not seem particularly cruel or critical. A rejection letter that does not even bother to specify what was so terrible about your writing is somehow even more cutting than a line-by-line critique. This is all part of writing, though. Even Judy Blume has her rejection …
May 7, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Write the Book You Need to Exist
Eleanor Catton thought there was a need for a book that was “structurally ornate” and lengthy but still had a driving plot. She looked around and didn’t find one that satisfied what she wanted. So she went ahead and wrote The Luminaries, which, as everyone likes to remind you, came in at over 800 pages. …
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April 30, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Be a Vampire of Raging Love
How do you live a good life in a fallen world? What can writers, or really any breed of creative, do to find something worth writing, imagining, making when surrounded by so much chaos and things seemingly designed to make you give up hope? A 13-year-old who wants to find a life in some kind …
April 23, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Tell the Truth Shamelessly
Often literary fiction is viewed as needing to be disconnected to some degree from what is happening in the world. Timelessness can be preferred to immediacy. For her part, Lydia Millet (A Children’s Bible) strives to write fiction that wrestles with everything happening around us. In The Atlantic, she described the challenge of doing that …
April 17, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Somewhere in Queens’
Directed, co-written by, and starring Ray Romano, Somewhere in Queens is opening this Friday. My review is at Slant: Intermittently funny and touching, but ultimately forgettable, Ray Romano’s overcooked family comedy Somewhere in Queens is about a protective couple who can’t quite let their son go. Leo (Romano) and Angie Russo (Laurie Metcalf) fret over nearly everything …
April 16, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Live to Write
Whether the result was nuanced studies of fraught relationships, eye-opening stories of people straining to connect their political beliefs with their lives, or boundary-expanding science fiction, Doris Lessing produced books that were heavy with ideas but also clearly the result of a life fully lived. Lessing, a British-Zimbabwean who led full lives as an anti-apartheid …
Writer’s Corner: Live to Write
Whether the result was nuanced studies of fraught relationships, eye-opening stories of people straining to connect their political beliefs with their lives, or boundary-expanding science fiction, Doris Lessing produced books that were heavy with ideas but also clearly the result of a life fully lived. Lessing, a British-Zimbabwean who led full lives as an anti-apartheid …
April 12, 2023
TV Room: ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’
The last season of Amazon’s highly addictive The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a screwball comedy as filtered through Mad Men and mid-1960s Broadway farce, starts this Friday. My review is at Slant: Through its first four seasons, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel kept an increasing number of plates spinning at a speed that could leave you at once in …
April 9, 2023
Writer’s Desk: Just Finish It
Despite the legacy that came from from the novel that Alfred Hitchcock used as the basis for Psycho, Robert Bloch never quite achieved notice outside the world of the pulps. Nevertheless, he was a talented writer who rode just about every trend there was, from Weird Tales horror to 1960s genre television. Bloch was also …
April 3, 2023
Screening Room: ‘Air’
Against all the odds, Ben Affleck’s new movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal when he had just started his career is actually not too bad, in a Jerry Maguire kind of way. My review is at PopMatters: A true underdog redemption story with an unexpected kick, Air is about how shambling sports …
