Books Quote by Ben Dolnick

“Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business of committee meetings and PR releases; you might as well storm a butterfly den with a klieg light.”

Ben Dolnick

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.5 out of 5 (10 ratings)

More by Ben Dolnick

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

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

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

Image

Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.

Ben Dolnick

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

Image

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

Ben Dolnick

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

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

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

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

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