New York Review of Books
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Gore Vidal’s Great Orson Welles Story
I’ve read a lot of Orson Welles stories, but somehow I missed many of the gems in this fantastic NYRB essay by Gore Vidal. Here’s one of my favorites, where Vidal and Welles are analyzing “like a pair of Talmudic scholars” a draft of Rudy Vallée’s memoirs, which Vidal has managed to get his hands on: As professional storytellers, Continue reading
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Blog Fail! Worst Post of the Year #3
It’s the Blogiversary here on the Jacke Blog. One year of bringing you the hits. And the duds. We’re counting all of them down. So far we’ve seen a pair of Objects grabbing spots five and four on the list of most popular posts. On the list of duds, we’ve seen a hopeless pen review and Continue reading
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The Failure of the Unpublished Author: Dead or Dying?
We’re fans of failure on this blog (as we are in life). And of course, The Race: A Novella has a failed lawyer as one of its pole stars. Now Tim Parks brings things full circle with a look at failed writers, which of course we’re HUGE fans of as well, when we’re not self-hating them. (Oh boy Continue reading
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Parks v. Sacks: Can A Novelist Make Magic?
Tim Parks is a novelist and critic. (The distinction is important.) Recently he wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books blog about the current state of novels, and what it means for today’s novelist. Parks’s essay, worth reading in its entirety, starts out slowly. Parks apparently feels compelled to describe (only to Continue reading
Jacke Wilson 