“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


Friday, August 3, 2012

'Graham Greene Is The World's Greatest Second-Rate Novelist'



Below is a video of a talk I gave the other month on Graham Greene's The Quiet American, a book that I am ultimately not fond of (for reasons that I articulate in the video). Also, N.B. the clip assumes you have read the novel, so there are massive spoilers about the ending from the very start.





Posted by Emmett Stinson at 11:52 AM

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