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 more readily than fling other people's nuts and bolts into their toolboxes. — 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 the shelf with a single stretched hand. You'd be holding an eclectic bunch. — 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
