In 2003, English writer James Lasdun taught a fiction workshop at a college in New York City. The star of the workshop was a woman in her 30s he calls “Nasreen”, who was working on a novel based on her family’s experiences in pre-revolutionary Iran. “There are seldom more than a couple of students in any workshop who seem natural writers, and they aren’t hard to spot,” Lasdun writes in the early pages of his memoir, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. “It was evident to me, after a few paragraphs, that Nasreen was one of them. Her language was clear and vigorous with a distinct fiery expressiveness in the more dramatic passages that made it a positive pleasure to read.”

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When you read David Shields, the first thing you learn is that he takes literature very seriously. The second thing you learn is how seriously he takes his taking seriously of literature. There’s a striking moment in the closing pages of his new book, “How Literature Saved My Life,” when he tells us that he is interested only in literature that obliterates the boundary between life and art. “Acutely aware of our mortal condition,” he writes, “I find books that simply allow us to escape existence a staggering waste of time (literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it).” If there were such a thing as a quintessentially Shields­ian pronouncement, this may be it, with its odd tonal mixture of the bombastic and the beseeching. Shields wants you to know that he is a writer for whom neither life nor art is a matter to be taken lightly.

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My wife, who is pregnant with our first child, had her three-month sonogram in early September. Right after the scan was finished, I had to run out of the hospital and down the street to where we’d parked our car about an hour and a quarter earlier. We’d only had enough loose change to pay for an hour’s parking, and we were in increasing danger of getting clamped. I sat in the car and waited while she signed some forms at the reception, and as the rain spilled relentlessly down on the windshield, I took my phone out of my pocket and looked at the photograph I had taken of the sonogram image just a few minutes before. It struck me as a strange and uniquely contemporary experience, to be looking at an image on a screen that depicted another image on another screen that represented my first glimpse of my first child; it was somehow, paradoxically, all the more touching for this sense of an alienating technological double remove.

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An extract at Slate from my ebook Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever

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Who was the worst novelist in history? A definitive answer is probably impossible, given that total artistic failure traditionally results in total obscurity. But it would be foolish to even consider the question without taking into account a very notable exception to that rule—a schoolmistress from Northern Ireland whose novels were so uniquely and thrillingly terrible that, in the early years of the last century, she became an ironic cause célèbre among the cultural luminaries of her time. Her story gives us some perspective on what we tend to think of as a uniquely contemporary phenomenon: the ironic appreciation of bad art—of monkey-faced frescos and multichapter R&B melodramas. This terrible novelist was a sort of early avatar of the spirit of the Epic Fail.

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There’s an aspect of the David Foster Wallace nonfiction reading experience that hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, been much remarked upon. To read his essays, reviews and articles is (for me at least) to feel a kind of retrospective anxiety on behalf of the unknown editors who commissioned them in the first place. For instance, one of the pieces collected in Both Flesh and Not, the new assortment of Wallace’s nonfiction, is a review of a special issue of a journal dedicated to the form of the prose poem. Early in the piece, which originally appeared in the literary periodical Rain Taxi, Wallace makes a point of explaining the unorthodox way in which it’s written (essentially, it takes the form of an exhaustive itemised list of aspects of the text): “The words preceding each item’s colon technically constitute neither subjective complement nor appositive nor really any recognised grammatical unit at all; hence none of these antecolonic words should count against RT‘s rigid 1,000-word limit.”

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A balding man in his early-to-mid 40s sits at a kitchen table, wearing a blue cardigan and a look of placid expectancy. A number of items are arranged in front of him on the tabletop—a paperback book, a large souvenir coffee mug, a plastic container. A child’s voice, off camera, can be heard giddily shouting “Go, Daddy, Go!” The man then begins a dextrous finger-drum solo; he starts out tamely enough, laying down a stolid 4/4 with the heel and fingers of his right hand, but gradually builds toward a sustained run of jazzy showboatery, using the various items as improvised kick drums, snares and cymbals. By the end of the two-minute video, he’s tearing it up like a Gene Krupa of kitchenalia, maintaining his benignly cocksure facial expression all the while, but clearly getting a kick out of how much of a kick his children are getting out of him. You could enjoy watching this YouTube video without knowing anything about this man—it’s entertaining enough just seeing a father thrilling his kids with an interlude of incidental virtuosity—but it adds an extra layer of counterintuitive delight to know that he is in fact James Wood, New Yorker staff writer and, arguably, one of the most influential cultural critics of his generation.

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How much ambiguity can a novel sustain while still keeping a firm hold on the reader’s attention? How much apparently crucial information can be withheld before the reader begins to feel manipulated or, worse, overlooked? These questions may not have been on Stig Saeterbakken’s mind when he was writing Self-Control, but they were certainly on mine when I was reading it. And the answer to both – if the extent to which I found the novel compelling is anything to go by – seems to be a surprisingly large amount.

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Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 by Roberto Bolaño

Originally published in Stonecutter Issue 2

Roberto Bolaño’s introduction to a 1999 Spanish edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with one of those great and flagrant generalizations for which, among many other things, his writing is remarkable. “All American novelists,” he announces, “including those who write in Spanish, at some point get a glimpse of two books looming on the horizon. These books represent two paths, two structures, and above all two plots. Even sometimes: two fates. One is Moby-Dick and the other is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The fact that the piece, which is included towards the end of Between Parentheses, is entitled “Our Guide to the Abyss” is only the first clue to Bolaño’s readers that he is writing at least as much about his own fiction here as he is about Mark Twain’s (the abyss, the empty presence of absence itself, is a symbol as central to Bolaño’s work as the labyrinth is to that of his great hero Borges). Read More

A word of warning: If you decide to download Rob Delaney’s new online-only standup special, you should be prepared to listen to a great many reflections on, and observations about, the subject of semen. Delaney does tackle a variety of other (mostly autobiographical) topics throughout the course of the 60 minute special—unsuccessful experiments in anal sex, the methodology of masturbation, torrential public diarrhea, flatulence as a weapon of class warfare—but it’s to semen that he most frequently returns. It’s the conspicuous leitmotif of his work.All That Jizz probably wouldn’t be a commercially viable title to give a comedy special (even a self-released download-only comedy special), but it would have been no less accurate than the brusquely utilitarian Live at the Bowery Ballroom.

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