“Such are the perfections of fiction...Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness...There is more profit in an hour’s talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said 'Help me,' he’d hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry.” – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things


Thursday, July 21, 2011

Sergio De La Pava Interview

I missed this a few weeks ago, but Sergio De La Pava has given his first-ever interview--which is great news, except for the fact that the article's in Spanish. That being said, even those with limited Spanish (like me) should be able to muddle through--or you can always just use Google's translate function, which will give you 90% of the sense (though not the tone). My favourite bit: when De La Pava (whose novels are self-published) is asked about the publishing industry, he replies by saying (roughly): "I don't understand--are you telling me that there are companies who will pay writers to publish their books? (ha ha)."

(N.B. I found out about this through the excellent blog, Conversational Reading, which, really, is a site worth visiting on a daily basis...)

Thursday, July 7, 2011