How to Read a Novelist

John Freeman

“True storytellers write not because they can but because they have to. There is something they want to say about the world that can only be said in a story.”

What makes a great interview:

The Graphic Canon, Vol. 3: From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest

Russ Kick

Some of today’s most exciting visual artists take on the literary canon’s classics: Ulysses in six panels, Colette in pen and ink, Yeats in watercolor, and other literary springboards for art. Delicious images at the link:

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

Andrea Pitzer

Nabokov and Homeland Security – how Russia’s most revered literary émigré became an American

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series

Malcolm Cowley

“The germ of a story is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood.”

The great Malcolm Cowley on the four stages of writing:

Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds

Harold Bloom

“Genius, in its writings, is our best path for reaching wisdom … the true use of literature for life.”

Harold Bloom’s 100 geniuses of language and literature, visualized.

Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers

R. Kent Rasmussen

“This world would not be satisfying unless one person were allowed to express gratitude and thanks to another.”

Heart-warming fan mail for Mark Twain

Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf

Sybil Oldfield

“For myself and others it is the end of a world. I merely feel quite numb at the moment, and can’t think about this or anything else…”

T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, E.M. Foster, Elizabeth Bowen, H.G. Wells, and others grapple with the ineffable

Tender Buttons: Objects

Gertrude Stein

“A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes…”

A book is a book is a book… unless it’s a BOOK. Gertrude Stein’s vintage verses about objets, gloriously illustrated by artist Lisa Congdon.

A Writer’s Diary

Virginia Woolf

“The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. … What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. ”

Virginia Woolf on the creative benefits of keeping a diary:

Monday or Tuesday

Virginia Woolf

A rare first edition, featuring gorgeous black-and-white woodcuts by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell:

Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909

Virginia Woolf

“All the Arts … imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see.”

Virginia Woolf’s early journals and letters:

My Ideal Bookshelf

Jane Mount & Thessaly La Force

Artist Jane Mount paints “portraits” of beloved thinkers (writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers) through the spines of their favorite books – absolutely wonderful:

Both Flesh and Not: Essays

David Foster Wallace

“Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.”

David Foster Wallace on the nature of fun:

Kurt Vonnegut: Letters

Kurt Vonnegut

“In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me.”

Vonnegut’s uncompromising daily routine:

The Graphic Canon, Vol. 2: From “Kubla Khan” to the Brontë Sisters to The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Russ Kick

Some of today’s most exciting graphic artists adapt a remarkable spectrum of literature since 1800, spanning everything from “the bad boys of Romanticism” — Keats, Byron, and Shelley — to cornerstones of science and philosophy like Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.