Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse. — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
To learn a piece on the piano - even a simple one - has proved every bit as agonizing as writing a… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
If you were placing bets on which author would write the tenderest, most moving book about fatherhood, Philip Roth would probably come… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
For me, novel-writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, fatally misguided. The challenge has always been in assuring myself… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
'At Freddie's' takes place in 1960s London at the Temple Stage School for child actors. It has a plot that makes you… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
When I first read 'At Freddie's', I was struggling with my own writing, particularly with how to write about a sad subject… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
Penelope Fitzgerald's nine novels are thin enough that if you were so inclined, you could take her entire literary output down from… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
A novel quite possibly won't be good and, even more possibly, will have not-good parts, but at least it won't shape-shift on… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
For a long time, since story collections look almost precisely like novels, I presumed that they were meant to be enjoyed in… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
People often talk about the characters in books as if they were considering whom to invite to a dinner party. 'Oh, I… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse. — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
During the couple of years it took to write 'At The Bottom of Everything', I decided, on the sort of hopeful whim that occasionally… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about. — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
Literary interviews are inevitably packed with the nuts and bolts of how writers do their work, and there's very little that aspiring writers do… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
True atonement isn't the periodic shaving of karmic stubble via confessional; it requires deep, truthful change. It means doing the hardest thing of all:… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
Beginning in middle school, the era of wide-margined, Bible-paged anthologies, short stories develop unpromising associations - and these associations often linger through college, when… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
Every morning as I begin my work day, my computer presents me with the usual array of garbage: email, Twitter, updates on the state… — Ben Dolnick Copy Share Image
