Coming of Age at the End of Days by Alice LaPlante
If, like me, you were raised on a steady diet of Rapture sermons, you’ll find much to relate to in Coming of Age at the End… Read More »Coming of Age at the End of Days by Alice LaPlante
If, like me, you were raised on a steady diet of Rapture sermons, you’ll find much to relate to in Coming of Age at the End… Read More »Coming of Age at the End of Days by Alice LaPlante
Stephen King recently sat down with Jessica Lahey of The Atlantic Monthly to talk about teaching writing. King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft… Read More »Writers on Writing: Stephen King on Grammar & Work
I’ve been reading Chip Kidd’s Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design. Although the book was written for a younger audience, it’s a gorgeous, superbly readable crash course… Read More »The Art of Simplicity – tips for writers from graphic designer Chip Kidd
Are you a novelist, a short story writer, or both? I’m currently reading Ann Patchett’s essay collection, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, which… Read More »A Handful of Glorious Pages
by Michelle Richmond (This article originally appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine.) The term “genre fiction” traditionally refers to any novel… Read More »How to Write & Pitch the Cross-Genre Novel – Part 1
1. Writers just want to be read. I recently heard a young woman at a party say that writers don’t mind when their books are… Read More »3 Myths That Are Killing Literary Culture
1. Writers just want to be read. I recently heard a young woman at a party say that writers don’t mind when their books are… Read More »The Copyright Problem: Three Myths That Are Killing Literary Culture
Despite her knowledge of Greek and her voracious reading of the classics, Virginia Woolf considered herself a self-taught reader. As a woman, she had been denied the illustrious Oxford education that the men in her family enjoyed. As it turns out, her lack of affectation, her insistence on taking pleasure in reading, is what makes her essays on literature so lucid, smart, and delicious to read.
Reviewing The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6: 1933-1941, for the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwarz notes that, despite Woolf’s place in “the highest stratum of the English intellectual aristocracy,” her essays were written not for the academic but for the common reader, the category in which she rather modestly placed herself. The common reader, she posited, “reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.”
Here, Schwarz excerpts Woolf’s essay “Hours in a Library”:
A reader must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill…the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading. The true reader is a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open-minded and communicative, to whom eating is more the nature of brisk exercise in the open wire than of a sheltered study.
For all of her wealth and status–the very condition that allowed her the coveted room of one’s own–Woolf also believed passionatelym Schwarz notes, in the democracy of reading, as evidenced in her essay “The Leaning Tower.”
Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground.
Woolf’s prescription for the survival of literature, which might have ruffled feathers in her time, is no less meaningful today. Literature will survive, she wrote,
if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country…teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve and how to create.Read More »I am the Common Reader: Virginia Woolf on pleasure, reading, & the survival of literature
This week, Yuvi Zalkow interviewed Thaisa Frank for The Rumpus. They met at the bar of the Hotel Rex, where Frank, author most recently of… Read More »Writers on Writing: Thaisa Frank