Saul Bellow was an old-fashioned man of letters. Part of what that means is that he traded a lot of letters with other people and seemed to have literary aspirations for his letters. I read a review of his newly collected letters which said that since people don’t write letters anymore, this was probably the last rich collection of letters we’d be seeing from a literary man. I doubt this is true, considering the generation after him figures prominently in his letters. I doubt Philip Roth will allow the posthumous publication of his letters, but I bet his letters will rival Bellow’s letters, some of which are to Roth. I also know that writers even from my own generation are still trading letters with the likes of, say, Don DeLillo. And I’ve seen the treasure trove of Raymond Carver’s correspondence in the Charvat collection at the Ohio State University, where I had to sign a form saying I wouldn’t tell you what was in them, but, listen hot-shit literary biographers interested in Carver’s era: There is stuff in there that will make your hair stand on end. There was a fair bit of nastiness flying about our nation’s postal thoroughfares in Carver days.

But I digress. Bellow’s letters are worth your time. They’re occasionally cranky. He was a political bird, to be sure, and it served his writing career and the writing career of others he helped. This isn’t the best stuff. The best stuff comes in late-life letters to true pals about matters that aren’t literary. Even in his eighties, the guy had a tremendous psychological acuity, and he always had the knack for special language (he tells a correspondent that he is awaiting a letter “in which you would be a little more recognizable than the Oscar of ‘cons’ and cold-owl trips to see a girl who fucks.”)

We recently Bernhard-obsessed types (surely I’m not the only one) will be interested in this:

As for Thomas Bernhard, he is a very strange bird indeed. I read him with respect and even admiration but he doesn’t reach my warmer feelings. What he does reach is my own bottomless hatred of the Nazis, especially the Austrian ones. He would have you think that virtually all Austrians were and remain Nazis. I see no reason to disagree. When I read Karl’s lovely poem about Auden’s grave I wondered why Auden should have wished to pass his last years [at Kirchstetten] in the society of such creeps. I seem to recall that he even addressed affectionate lines to some of them.

“I’ve read Ms. Yuknavitch’s book The Chronology of Water, cover to cover, a dozen times. I am still reading it. And I will, most likely, return to it for inspiration and ideas, and out of sheer admiration, for the rest of my life. The book is extraordinary..”
–CHUCK PALAHNIUK, author of Fight Club and Pygmy

“The Chronology of Water’s central metaphor works beautifully: we all keep our heads above water, look around, and enjoy our corporeal life despite all the reasons not to; beyond that, the book is immensely impressive to me on a human level: the narrator/speaker/protagonist/author emerges from a seriously hellish childhood and spooky adolescence into a middle age not of bliss, certainly, but of convincing engagement and satisfaction.”
–DAVID SHIELDS, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

More praise here

Watch the book trailer here

Available for preorder now until April 1 from Powells or Amazon

So says Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter, and fiction writing teacher at Ball State University (and formerly in the M.F.A. program at the University of Pittsburgh.) The reason the story has become a dominant form is that the university workshop encourages the writing of stories, not the writing of novels. Her quite reasonable questions: “Do students write stories because they really want to or because the workshop model all but demands that they do? If workshops are bad for big things, why do we continue to use them?”

Here’s the whole essay, at The Millions.

I am getting better at laying the meshes down on the riverbank, without feeling that I have to explain to my students how rivers begin, which is all lies anyway.  Young river, old river, my ass.  We studied that in Geography but the girls who went on to do it for A Level said that when they got there, they were told, straight off, that rivers, in and of themselves, don’t age.  That the young river thing makes the force of time comprehensible in the absence of a true geology curriculum.  Reading Winnicott on deep play, and still dazzled from seeing Lynda Barry lecture on creativity last week, I understand that I have to avoid the tendency to tell my students what is what before they begin.  I have to let them begin.  I have to make enough room for a person to go a little wild, in the first stages of a process, something that universities generally curtail.