Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, by Paul Auster. Read by the author and brought to life in the movie Smoke.
posted by billyfleetwood on Dec 23, 2007 - 5 comments

The notorious Laura (Riding) Jackson, mistress and muse to Robert Graves, among others, is back with a new poem in the New Republic last week. There's a new biography and a new anthology coming out too, but the best things to read are her tirades to the New York Review of Books in response to critiques of her work by Paul Auster and Harry Matthews.
posted by oldleada on Feb 17, 2005 - 17 comments

Is It Fiction If It Says "Fiction" On The Cover? Jorge Luis Borges brilliantly obscured fact and fiction presenting fiction as fact. Things seem to have swung round 180º and fact is now increasingly being sold as fiction. This certainly seems to be the case with Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved. She's Paul Auster's second wife and... Well... now even critics, like The New York Observer's Joe Hagan have joined the fun, as Slate's Katie Roiphe duly noted. Fact is now presented as fiction, without the traditional disguise of the roman à clef. I think it's sad. In fact, it's an attempt on the life of imagination itself. Perhaps these authors who write memoirs masquerading as novels could be sued under the Trade Description Act? [With thanks to the always excellent Literary Salon weblog. Thanks to ColdChef for pointing it out to me.]
posted by MiguelCardoso on Apr 23, 2003 - 28 comments