Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 29
November 12, 2009
GUEST INTERVIEW: MICHELLE HUNEVEN
GUEST INTERVIEW BY DANIEL A. OLIVAS
Michelle Huneven is the author of three novels including her most recent, Blame (Farrar, Straus and 
Giroux), which has already garnered raves including a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly. Her nonfiction writings include restaurant reviews for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Weekly, other food journalism and, with Bernadette Murphy, the Tao Gals Guide to Real Estate (Bloomsbury). She has received a General Electric Foundation Award for...
November 8, 2009
TO GOTHAM
November 6, 2009
HOW THEY WRITE
Pamuk, Baker, Atwood, Ishiguro and others on how they write.
Booker-prize winner Michael Ondaatje's preferred medium is 8½-by-11-inch Muji brand lined notebooks. He completes the first three or four drafts by hand, sometimes literally cutting and pasting passages and whole chapters with scissors and tape. Some of his notebooks have pages with four layers underneath.
November 4, 2009
SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS
I was recently invited to participate in the "Significant Objects" art project, joining the likes of Christopher Sorrentino, Ed Park, Maud Newton, Colson Whitehead and Nicholson Baker. Short version is they send a bunch of writers a random photo (I got the yo-yo pictured above) and we write a very short fiction concerning said object. Object and its "story" are put on Ebay, and the entire project is documented for posterity. The curators are interested in how narrative assigns value to...
November 3, 2009
KIRSCH ON ROTH
Writing for Tablet Magazine, Adam Kirsch finds The Humbling "thinly imagined, with few surprises in plot or language."
The books he has produced since then, as he entered his 70s, can only be called late late Roth—or better still, endgame Roth, since they are a series of meditations on last things. In Everyman and Indignation, Roth's protagonists are actually dead, looking back on their lives from beyond the grave. In Exit Ghost, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is impotent, which for a Rothian...
November 2, 2009
CENTER FOR FICTION AWARDS DINNER
There are still tickets available for next week's Center for Fiction Awards Dinner, and although it's a steep tariff in these tough times, as you can see past events have been star-studded evenings, so if you're at all inclined to support the only organization in the country devoted solely to fiction, I know they'd love to have you. Hope to see you there ...
THOSE WHO CAN'T ...
For those interested, registration has officially opened for my first foray into higher learning, the Novel I writing course I will be teaching at UCLA in the Winter term. Syllabus has been submitted and here's the high level look at what the 10-week class will cover:
Week 1. Introductions & Beginnings
Week 2. Reading Like A Writer
Week 3. Characterization
Week 4. Voice, Language and Point of View
Week 5. Structure, Setting and Theme
Week 6. Work-shopping
Week 7. Dialogue
Week 8. Scene and...
October 30, 2009
TEV GIVEAWAY: THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, I - IV
If you've paid any attention whatsoever to TEV over the years, you'll know that we're just ga-ga about The Paris Review Interviews series. As each volume has come out, we've pretty much gobbled it up and they keep ending up in the Recommended sidebar for good reason. There is no better archive of the working process of the world's great writers.
With the release of the latest installment, The Paris Review Interviews IV - which features the likes of Philip Roth, Ezra Pound, Haruki...
October 29, 2009
ASTERIX TURNS 50
Tintin gets most of the press around here, but we're also great fans of Asterix, who turns 50 with much ado in France.
Those original sketches and typescripts, on worn pieces of exercise book paper, can now be seen, along with other pieces of early work, and Goscinny's Keystone Royal typewriter, at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. In the atmospheric setting of the third-century Gallo-Roman baths of the museum of the middle ages, the exhibition brings together the plates and manuscripts the pair...
