We live, as you may have noticed, in a degraded era, bombarded by facile, shallow, agenda-laced, too rapidly disseminated information bursts.
George Saunders proposes that, the seven short stories examined in this book written by Russian authors from a different era, will help us grapple with big “meaning-making” questions.
We're going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn't fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art-namely, to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?
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To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works
I am reading the introduction of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders and he writes: To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it …
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Writing is like painting, and some more
I watched an Orhan Pamuk interview on YouTube where he explains his “painterly practice” and how writing and painting are similar to him. Pamuk explains: I think writing novels is also like painting—visual …