Stranger on Earth

In my book there are two kinds of writers: the kind that produces record-breakers in publishing history, and the kind that tinkers away in quietude, far away from the limelight, the award shows, and public adulation.  Generalisations are unavoidable in the categorising of writers. The first kind is rarely preoccupied with aesthetic matters or ideological revolutions, preferring to do it “straight” to widen public appeal. His aim is to entertain (a filthy, filthy word in Literature) and to thrill the reader, to provide – here comes another scatological term – escapism(!) from the awful ordinariness of everyday life. The second kind is rarely aware of the reader’s needs and wants. He is more interested in his own thought process, the “sound” of the authorial voice, and the mechanics of writing. The reader is an afterthought to him. Every aspiring writer must at one point arrive at this crossroads and wonder which way to turn.  Either direction poses a series of...

From The New York Times July 4, 2012 To Use and Use Not By  JULIE BOSMAN In an interview in The Paris Review in 1958 Ernest Hemingway made an admission that has inspired frustrated novelists ever since: The final words of “A Farewell to Arms,” his wartime masterpiece, were rewritten “39 times before I was satisfied.” Those endings have become part of literary lore, but they have never been published together in their entirety, according to his longtime publisher, Scribner. A new edition of “A Farewell to Arms,” which was originally published in 1929, will be released next week, including all the alternate endings, along with early drafts of other passages in the book. The new edition is the result of an agreement between Hemingway’s estate and Scribner, now an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It is also an attempt to redirect some of the attention paid in recent years to Hemingway’s swashbuckling, hard-drinking image — through fictional depictions in the best-se...

The traditional reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is that of the Icarus legend: fly too high and too close to the sun, you will lose your wings and plunge to your death. Victor Frankenstein’s attempt to play God gives birth to a “monster” that will stop at nothing to destroy his loved ones. Its hideousness is an affront to civilised society and to godliness. Shelley’s novel does indeed lend itself fully to this reading, but a contemporary reading, one that bears in mind Man’s alienation in modern times, can reveal a new element or two. Doctor Frankenstein is referred to as “the Creator” on numerous occasions. His intellectual pursuit is entirely of a divine nature, as is evidenced in the following passage: It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my enquiries were directed to the metaphysical, o...