Interesting blog post - over at the Britannica Blog (Thanks, Tom) - by J.E. Luebering about the disappointing (for some) absence of explicit political content in Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel lecture. Luebering scours the text for “oblique” political references and reconstructs a political narrative that is both “submerged and obvious.”
It is true that the content of […]

Julian Barnes writes in The Guardian about going back to read Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, because the play was about to open at the National Theatre. He finds that 150 years after it was written, the novel — about two lovers who kill a husband and by killing the husband kill their own desire and […]

This past summer I was given Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire in its Greek incarnation - Ο Έρωτας θα ανατείλει ξανά. When I first opened the package and saw the title - Love Will Rise Again - I tried not to cringe at what on first look seemed like a melodramatic Greek romance novel. I […]

1. Who are you?
Ellen Meister, mom, wife, sister, daughter, writer, blogger, friend, lover, minivan-driver, contact lens wearer, migraine sufferer, cook, reader, hugger, laundress, skeptic, believer, supermarket shopper, homework helper, laugher, weeper, Scrabble player, PTA member, interviewee.
2. What do you write?
What I AIM to write is smart, funny novels about women and their relationships with one […]

My friend, Angel, sent me a link to a Guardian piece in which Brian Aldiss, author of Brothers of the Head (”the 1977 novel about conjoined twins who are exploited as a pop act [which] has now been made into a film”) looks at “the question of where creative ideas emerge from.”
Aldiss writes:
It’s all wrapped […]

A great novelist is essentially tolerant, that is, displays a real apprehension of persons other than the author as having a right to exist and to have a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves.
- Iris Murdoch
(I have no idea where this comes from. I’ve scribbled it on some paper and […]

Interesting piece in The Age about Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.
Novelist Kate Grenville has upset historians by claiming her Booker-shortlisted The Secret River is a new form of history writing.
…begins the report by Jane Sullivan. While researching the story, Grenville came across “dispatch from Governor Arthur Phillip, written a few months after the First […]