I think A Farewell to Arms is Hemingway's greatest novel, the truest. It’s also heartbreaking.”
—Edna O’Brien
“We can’t seem to stop using a certain kind of elevated, heroic language about war and it is our duty always to puncture it. No one has ever done that as eloquently as Hemingway, through the accumulating weight of his sentences, and the emotional clarity, the disgust and also the reverence for what has been done.”
—Tobias Wolff
Domenica Ruta, author of the critically-acclaimed memoir With or Without You (Spring ’13) discusses the books that inspired her as a child (though she wanted to be a figure skater/surgeon, not a writer, at the time), the differences between writing fiction and memoir, and “the alchemy of art ” with Discover Great New Writers.
Summer means different things to different people, depending on their age, their life situation, their life goals—and their reading habits. Some folks read their one book a year over the summer, lazing on a beach. Others sail into June with a reading list arranged alphabetically and by length. Some just like to wander into bookstores […]
For better or worse, the “director’s cut” has become ubiquitous in film. It’s almost a given that the home version of a popular film will squeeze in a few extra minutes of material cut from the theatrical release (thank George Lucas for sparking the trend). Once in a while, though, these are more than simple attempts […]
The act of creation isn’t always simple. Sure, sometimes writers receive a flash of inspiration and create something fully-formed. More often, writing a novel is a start-stop process, marked by flurries of intense work and stretches of contemplation. Most novels undergo serious revision between the initial idea and the final version. (Heck, some authors continue revising even […]