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Nominate-best-2010

This paperback original is a kind of best-of remix: 16 interviews selected from the echt lit mag’s 53-year history, the most recent never before published in book form, from Dorothy Parker (Issue 13, 1956) to Joan Didion (Issue 176, 2006). The “writers at work” series, of course, has long been manna for critics, fans, or the would-be novelist or poet and creative-writing-workshop addict intent on getting a behind-the-text look at the creative process as well as a peak at the more mundane aspects of work habits and routines. Here, it allows us to ask the question, as Philip Roth once put it in a PR interview, “Is he as crazy as I am?” What delights in this first of a projected three-volume series, is the inclusion of the obvious Pulitzer- and Nobel-heavyweights (Bellow, Borges, Hemingway, Elizabeth Bishop) alongside less likely subjects as poet Jack Gilbert, editor Robert Gottlieb, and noir master James M. Cain, who offers: “Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspiration.”

Related: Lions and lambs, Tripping, Poetic license, More more >
  Topics: Books , Media, Books, Elizabeth Bishop,  More more >
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ARTICLES BY JON GARELICK
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  •   MYRA MELFORD’S BE BREAD | THE WHOLE TREE GONE  |  February 02, 2010
    Few jazz players and composers can bring as broad a vocabulary to a single piece as pianist Myra Melford.
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  •   FUSIONISTS  |  January 12, 2010
    Nobody likes labels — except maybe critics. And we all want to live by Duke Ellington's measure of quality: beyond category. Beyond names and borders, that is, in a post-racial society. And yet, the word "fusion" — at least in music — has a pejorative connotation, suggesting bland pastiche and commercial opportunism.

 See all articles by: JON GARELICK

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