The Writer Laid Bare

Reading and writing are intertwined activities for me. I am drawn to reading and writing for the same reasons: to engage in a story, in different worlds, in extraordinary words.  I can’t remember a time in my life when I …

When I opened Lee’s email and saw her kind invitation to write a guest post for her blog, my instinctive reaction was – ‘Oh shit!’ Not, of course, because it was from Lee (whom I adore and admire), but because …

Last year an editor I’d worked with made what I initially thought was a puzzling remark about my writing. ‘I find your Russian worldview fascinating,’ she said. The work-in-question had nothing to do with Russia. Plus, while I’ve written in …

‘ . . . books, if they need to be written, will always find their moment.’

                                         Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage

As writers, we often experience the thrill of discovering a new narrative strategy and applying it to …

The recently departed Spanish novelist Javier Marías, asked once to identify the moment when he knew his vocation was that of writer, responded that in fact he had never wanted to be ‘a writer’. He drew a fine distinction between …

I grew up in a house without books. My parents loved TV, and occasionally listened to one of our two LPs — Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley — but they weren’t in the habit of reading.

One day, I heard …