Five Writers I Admire Talking About Writers They Admire

3:32 pm - July 30, 2012: 72 notes

Five Writers I Admire Talking About Writers They Admire

… when I read George Eliot, I read her for the descriptions of weather. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to read George Eliot, but how comforting, the way she describes light moving over trees and lying on a bench and somebody’s foot there … I think she has a much greater capacity for description than she allows herself. The weather is just a dab at the beginning of each chapter usually. Then she goes onto metaphysical dialogues where people discuss the meaning of life. But the weather is always there at the beginning, and it is undeniable. She just gets it. She describes clouds moving over the sun at eleven o’clock in the morning on a path in an oak forest and it’s just exactly how that it be. I admire that more than any other aspect of writing.

Jonathan Lethem on David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace deserves to be remembered as a great writer not because he was capable of doing PhD-level philosophical speculation as well as shunting fictional characters (slowly) through a well-described room, but because he mastered a certain area of human sensation: intricate self-conscious remorse at the fact of self-consciousness.

Wallace’s way of loading up this indistinct area with scrupulous depiction made a lot of people feel less lonely…

Alexander Chee on Daniel Clowes

[Daniel] Clowes’ comics have from the beginning of his career consistently outlined a vast country of the self-deceiving and the lonely, the heartsick and the heartless, the cruel and the lovable—America, basically, but as it is really lived. Even at his most bitingly satirical the jokes are only funny because they’re true … Clowe’s recent stories come from the place we know is ours. They are the revenge of the real. His characters are both unlike anything you see elsewhere in literature and completely familiar from life. The shock of recognition you get while reading him is that feeling that somehow the artist has found this thing you were sure no one else had seen.

Lydia Millet on Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian, is one of my favorite writers, and my favorite book of his is Woodcutters. All of his books are about some version of himself, and he’s very bitter, he hates the world, but also hates himself, and he has these long internal monologues of—because he wrote in German—these run-on sentences. It’s very interior, and very judgmental of culture. He hated Austrian culture with a vengeance, which was his own culture, the culture of Vienna. But it’s not without humor. Part of the space I’m talking about prose generating has to do with humor. There should be a lightness.

Dean Young on Wallace Stevens

[Wallace Stevens’s] work is extraordinarily beautiful and, God, sad! This is an interesting thing about Stevens. A lot of the time he’s just messing around. He’s able to evoke a sort of intellectual gravity but inhabit it with a kind of goofy play. But as his work goes on, there’s a darker vision that comes through in everything and with it the decorations drop away. His poems get barer and darker and more lonely, mourning the fact that there is no God, maybe, no connections that make sense of our life. The beauty of his language and the weirdness of his poems I find very inspiring. I also find it daunting.