Kasia Boddy

For a long time​ , people have been telling me to read Laurie Colwin – not friends so much as novelists like Jonathan Lethem, Brandon Taylor, Nick Hornby and Ann Patchett, who mention Colwin when asked to name an ‘overlooked or unappreciated writer’ or one they’d invite to an imaginary dinner party. And then there are all those Substack and Instagram lists suggesting...

Dorothy Parker​ dreaded repetition and found it everywhere. In 1919, when she was just 25 and only months into her stint as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic, she already claimed enough ‘bitter experience’ to know that ‘one successful play of a certain type’ would result in a ‘vast horde’ of copycats, ‘all built on exactly the same lines’. In...

Read any interview​ with Lore Segal and she’ll tell you about her shortcomings:

I seem to have a reluctance to make things happen.

I’m not a grand creator of new characters.

I keep rewriting everything 48 times.

I don’t have the long breath required to think in terms of a novel.

I’m bad at thinking about society.

I don’t know how to be serious without being funny.

I...

William Faulkner​ ’s story ‘Go Down, Moses’ begins with a lengthy description of a man. But it’s hard to get a handle on him. If the drapes, pleats and price of his suit are all ‘too much’, his face is ‘black, smooth, impenetrable’. The story elaborates on these details but also draws attention to the fact that they fail to interest his...

Donald Barthelme’s​ relationship with the New Yorker began in March 1963 and hasn’t ended yet, more than thirty years after his death. Every so often one of his stories pops up on the magazine’s monthly Fiction Podcast, in which writers are asked to choose a favourite piece from the archive to read and discuss. Many admit that they began their careers trying to emulate...