Posts From Author: Month: May 2015

Fail Better

The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis Simon & Schuster, 2014; 272pp   In 2010, Sandra Bullock was briefly my favorite person in the world. In the same weekend, she won and accepted the Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress (for All About Steve) and, for her role in The Blind Side, the Oscar for Best Actress. It was an astonishing act of humility; I doubt many in Hollywood would acknowledge so freely the unpredictability of artistic achievement. Bullock became, in that moment, a beacon of hope for all who see in their perceived failures the seeds of their future successes. Yes, she seemed to be saying, I did make All About Steve. But from the same well of emotion and experience that I drew on for that role came The Blind Side. If you try and fail, try again. Or, put another way: failure is not to try and fail, but to fail to try. This is the message of Sarah Lewis’s inspiring book The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, which recasts failure as a useful and perhaps even essential step on the path to success, innovation, […]
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Steven Pinker On Style

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker Viking, 2014; 368pp Is it better to err unwittingly or to be all crouching pedant, hidden snoot? This is perhaps a question more of lifestyle than writing style, but one I nevertheless contemplated throughout the happy week I spent surfing the pages of Steven Pinker‘s new writing guide, The Sense of Style. He offers no easy answers — sometimes it’s definitely better to put your foot down; sometimes you’ll end up with egg on your face — but, having read it, I go back out into the world with a renewed sense of purpose and a better-calibrated sonar for the faux pas. Like Pinker, I’ve been known to dip into style manuals for pleasure. I pride myself on being pretty good at spelling, punctuation, and grammar (although I’ve stopped putting that on my dating profile — it turns me off, let alone potential candidates). But with great power comes great responsibility. You can crush someone with a correction, however subtly administered. To point out an error in grammar or punctuation is, to me, no better than to tell someone they look rough today, or to ask them if they […]
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April 20 2015, Flavorwire

House of Speakeasy with Amber Tamblyn
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ReadEasy, 15 May 2015

ReadEasy: a literary submarine cruising the depths of the internet. This week: writers recommend writers. That’s nice. Read on for top tips for #FridayReads et al from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Margaret Attwood, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Sedaris.   (Pause to get a coffee. This is not part of the found object. :] ) NB the gold standard for #TwitterFiction is Jennifer Egan's "Black Box."— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) May 13, 2015 …written during the Twitter Fiction Festival. Very well, Margaret: here is Jennifer Egan‘s “Black Box“.   Knausgaard recommends… Holly Hunter, Brandon J. Dirden and Corey Stoll were the readers at Symphony Space’s packed-out “Evening with Karl Ove Knausgaard” last Wednesday, which also featured an interview with the man himself, nimbly, wittily conducted by Hari Kunzru. “I wanted to be a writer for almost all the wrong reasons,” the great Norwegian confessed to Kunzru; “I had failed as a rock musician.” Rock music’s loss was literature’s gain — Zadie Smith has compared Knausgaard to crack, and others are just as ecstatic. All this despite the critical near-consensus (bordering on cliché) that his six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle (published in hardback by Archipelago Books and in paperback by FSG) is in many ways quite banal. […]
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One Simple Rule

After hearing from our six guest writers in April on the subject “One Simple Rule”, you might think we’d have some pretty solid advice for you. We don’t. Write what you know? Well, sometimes it’s best not to. Everyone should know CPR? Granted; hard to argue. Back up your work? Phew, yes, we’d all have saved ourselves some stress by following that one. Break all of the rules, always? We don’t like to be too prescriptive here… Well, we’ll leave you to judge, as you enjoy the wit and wisdom of Elif Shafak, Tom Rob Smith, Amber Tamblyn, Lisa Robinson, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Beau Willimon. Elif Shafak was first up to the mic. An industrious author, Shafak has published several novels, numerous articles, and a collection of nonfiction. She’s a TED Talker. She’s Turkey’s most widely read female writer. She’s perplexed, then, by what she perceives to be a cult of idleness among many Middle Eastern men. “All across the Middle East, if you travel,” she said, “you will come across thousands and thousands of men — and always men — just sitting, playing backgammon, chatting — smoking, mostly — until it’s time to go home.” These men are not the subjects of her work, though. “What I’m interested in […]
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Sheep-dipping, singing, and feminism with Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts

On April 21, our co-founder Amanda Foreman interviewed Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts about their roles in Thomas Vinterberg’s new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd at New York’s La Grenouille. Below is a transcript of their talk.   Amanda Foreman: I think the reason why we love the nineteenth-century novelists — the Brontës, the Dickenses, the Hardys, the George Eliots of this world — is because they both give us these traditional truths about humanity, and yet they also dissect them, they eviscerate them. The premise of Far From the Madding Crowd is very simple. It’s about love, it’s about betrayal, and it’s about money. These are eternal concepts. They revolve around a young woman named Bathsheba Everdene, who is a young country girl who suddenly comes into a great deal of money. With that independence comes not the freedom she thought she was going to have, because she is surrounded by three male antagonist-protagonists. And it’s her visceral struggle for independence vis-à-vis these three men. Because it’s about Bathsheba, I’m going to start with Carey Mulligan, who plays Bathsheba. I must say, you’re currently also playing a role in David Hare’s Skylight, about a woman who refuses to be defined by the men […]
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