Latest Posts
At what point should a journalist transmute first-hand experience into fiction? Where does one draw the line between what can be reported as fact and what should probably be reported some other way, even if one has seen it with
On April 15, 2013, two pressure-cooker bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than two hundred and sixty. The media—mainstream and citizen, offline and on—went into round-the-clock torches-and-pitchforks mode, misidentifying suspects,
Back in my film student days, I set myself an immodest goal: I would write and direct my first feature film by the age of twenty-six. The number wasn’t chosen at random: Orson Welles was twenty-six when he made Citizen
The tradition of prison literature goes back a long way and can be roughly divided into two sub-genres: books written after the fact—Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom—and those that were penned behind bars:
Does the world really need another book about writers eking out a living at the beginning of their careers, another portrait of artists as young men? The age-old, slightly disingenuous adage to write what you know often appears to have
Paul Chowder is turning fifty-five, wants his ex-girlfriend back, and is considering giving up poetry in favour of writing pop songs. First introduced in Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, he is the sort of character so ordinary that one might not
The recent anniversary of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes twenty years ago last month, was met with a plethora of articles extolling the film and its legacy. This is hardly surprising. Tarantino’s sophomore effort
A friend of mine, a Hemingway scholar and long-time bull-runner, once met Norman Mailer. He cannot remember much of the evening, but he remembers the most important part. “Norman,” he asked at the height of their inebriation, “why do we