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Pulp, performing ‘Sheffield: Sex City’ on…

Pulp, performing ‘Sheffield: Sex City’ on ITV’sThe Warehouse in 1993.

What’s Your Favourite Short Story Collection?

Raymond Carver: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? I first read Raymond Carver when I was seventeen, on my way to watch Short Cuts. (I wanted to say I’d read the book first. I was that kind of teenager.) I didn’t get it at first; these were hardly stories at all, I thought, but paper-thin …

On rocky islands gulls woke.

There are many things to love about the writing of George Saunders. I’ll come back to some of them another time. There are many things to love about The Brain-dead Megaphone, his collection of essays (Bloomsbury, 2008), some of which I may also come back to. But for now I want to highlight a couple …

Some gulls waking on a rocky island, earlier.

Some gulls waking on a rocky island, earlier.

"Literature is driven by influence, just as the solar system is driven by gravitational force. So…"

“Literature is driven by influence, just as the solar system is driven by gravitational force. So what?” – Natsuki Ikesawa

Influence & Translation, a discussion

More from the Worlds 11 conference in Norwich; this time Maureen Freely taking the lead in a discussion on influence and translation (the role of influence in translation and the influence of translation on other writing). Maureen Freely began by describing her childhood in Istanbul, stating memorably that the best part of living or travelling abroad is the …

"If a young poet falls in love with one poet, they won’t become a poet; but if they fall in…"

“If a young poet falls in love with one poet, they won’t become a poet; but if they fall in love with two poets, they will.” – Norman Dubie, quoted in paraphrase by Christopher Merrill at Worlds 11.

‘Influence and Creative Writing’, a discussion

In his introductory remarks to this discussion (at Worlds 11; see below), Professor Jon Cook noted that Harold Bloom’s famous book on the anxiety of influence should have been called the inevitability of influence. He talked about how, when we write – or, rather, when we publish – we are ‘drawn into a network of …

Worlds Literature Festival, 2011. Norwich.

I spent last week on the campus of the University of East Anglia, as part of a conference organised by Writers’ Centre Norwich which brings together writers from across the world to talk about and share their experiences of writing. This year’s theme was influence, in relation to Creative Writing, translation, and poetry and form. …