literature

Seveneves is a giant sci-fi novel by Neal Stephenson. I use the term novel loosely here. It isn’t so much a novel as a history textbook about an event that didn’t happen: the moon exploded. I say this because there isn’t really story or characters in the traditional sense. On the Textbook Style The sense … Read more

In the previous posts in this series, I’ve taken off with the assumption that most people reading will have a familiarity with the giant novel. This time I’ll start from the basics. Ulysses by James Joyce is one of those books that many people have heard of but probably still can’t tell you much about. … Read more

Although David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite writers of all time, I’ve put off examining his prose until late in this series. I did this on purpose, because the writers we have looked at “follow the rules.” They use clean, minimalist prose. It’s easy to see and articulate why it is good. It’s … Read more

The next giant novel of the year has been taking me quite a bit of time. I’ve chosen The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson, to change things up a bit. It is the first book in a long epic fantasy series. I’ve written about Sanderson’s Mistborn in the past. I didn’t worry about spoilers … Read more

I went into Moby-Dick with very few preconceptions. The only thing I had heard about it was that there is some chapter on cetology, and everyone finds it too tedious to keep reading. I think this is a poor excuse because it doesn’t occur until Chapter 32 and it isn’t that long. Description in Moby-Dick … Read more

Today we’ll examine something I think Ethan Canin does well: description. Description is one of those things that is very hard to get right. I think this is because it is difficult to notice when someone has done a good job. Bad description jumps out; good description goes unnoticed. Description Prose Style Everyone notices an … Read more

Don Quixote is Miguel de Cervantes giant novel that I’m using to kick off my “Year of Giant Novels.” This will be my thoughts on it. Preliminaries Back in my youth, I used to love reading giant novels: Infinite Jest, Underworld, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Les Misérables, etc. There are still quite … Read more

This lengthy article dives into my experiences with several of John Cheever’s most famous short stories. A Word on Stories I have a confession. I don’t get why John Cheever’s short stories are so loved. If you look at my past blog posts, you’ll see that I could pontificate for hours on the greatness of … Read more

Today we’ll examine the prose of Philip Roth. Roth is one of my favorite prose stylists, and I’m not sure it will be possible to convey why by analyzing a brief section of writing. This is because my favorite part of his style is how he drops profound sentences in the middle of ordinary paragraphs, … Read more

This article is an analysis of what Jonathan Franzen does in the second section of his 2015 novel Purity. The Rosetta Stone A year and a half ago I wrote a post explaining how David Foster Wallace’s short story/novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” was a parody of Barth’s “Lost in the … Read more