Writers Recommend

"Something that has energized me lately is this great new site called HTMLgiant.com. They call it 'the internet literature magazine blog of the future,' and I've decided that joking or not, I think they're right. They cover a broad range of what's happening in the indie lit world with an enthusiasm that you would be hard put to find elsewhere. The contributors regularly take to the mat in the comments section, with down-and-dirty brawls of the highest literary order. This is a blog that makes me want to read/write/tear down a few walls."
—Zach Plague, author of Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring (Featherproof Books, August 2008)

"When I despair about my work, I dig out a book that I discovered years ago in college: Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write. Her essays explain how creativity in any form—writing, planting a garden, starting a business—is crucial for leading a good life. The book is anti-critic and anti-publishing world and this is what I like about it. Not because I don’t want to impress the critics (I do), but because Ueland writes so eloquently about what happens at the core—that scary moment when the author is alone at her desk with only a blank page before her."
—Rishi Reddi, author of Karma and Other Stories (Ecco, 2007)

"When I’m stuck in a poem it usually means my engagement with the subject is lacking intensity, and instead of fully entering the material, I feel like I’m at the doorway tentatively knocking in that lazy way we do when we don’t actually want to be admitted. One piece of writing that can reliably revive me from this state is the title essay in Guy Davenport’s Geography of the Imagination. In the grand finale of this short essay, Davenport looks at Grant Wood’s painting, American Gothic. But here looking is the most active, most adrenalized, most divine activity possible. With an inspired X-ray gaze that feels downright otherworldly, an uncanny reading emerges. Looking passes into seeing, and the figure of the writer is restored to that of seer. Davenport’s fans are passionate, and yet I think too few. I wish more poets would read him!"
—Robyn Schiff, author of Revolver (University of Iowa Press, 2008)

"When reading Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, I get the sense that a very short movie lives inside each sentence. Whether focused on a wall or a person, his sentences contain a whirlwind of movement that culminates in a mini visual narrative, confirming that in Schulz’s world, there is no such thing as an inanimate object. Everything has life, because he breathes life into every thing by using surprising verbs and cinematic metaphors. Nearly empty of plot, the book is fueled by the power of his language alone, which reminds me that if I focus on writing the best sentence, the rest will follow."
—Nami Mun, author of Miles from Nowhere (forthcoming from Riverhead Books in January 2009)