What relationship, if any, does the anticolonial novel of ideas bear to the contemporary “theory novel”? Nguyen’s novels expose the tension between the two forms.
Category Archives: Blog
7. On Rewriting the World
“Writing is a community practice,” Garza says. “When we write, we write with others. We always write with materials that are not our own.”
6. On Having Something to Say
“I write only when I have something to say” — How should a Caribbean writer of my generation take this? Moreover, Is it a good advice for a teacher to give her writing students?
5. Writing Home
“Home is a place where I exist at every age.”
4. Sigrid Nunez’s Visions of Life
Novels, she says, should provide a “vision of life” rather than a “fascinated horror” of it.
3. Tom Perrotta’s Writerly Ethic
“Who do we, as writers, choose not to leave behind?”
2. Jennifer Egan, Reverberator
“The novel wraps itself around you like a cocoon.”
1. On the Audio Culture of Letters
I think of my favorite literary interviews as revelatory events: occasions, in Toni Morrison’s words, “when some moment or phrase flares like a lightning bug” and all participants “see it at the same time and… remember it the same way”.
Novel Dialogue 