Page-Turner April 8, 2014 Slide Show: Kurt Vonnegut’s Whimsical Drawings Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,’s crude, ludic doodles—a beaver, a cobra, an asterisk-anus—are famous from novels like “Breakfast of Champions,” as is the curly-haired self-portrait that doubled as his signature. What Muriel Spark Saw She loved lightning. To her readers, Dame Muriel Spark arrived aptly named and like a bolt from the blue in 1957, with her first novel, “The Comforters,” published when she was thirty-nine. April 7, 2014 A Novel Like a Rocket After writing seven thousand pages over twelve and a half years, I now have a novel, published this week, that is two hundred and twenty-four pages long. The novel is called “Family Life,” and it is based on my own experience. Sergei Dovlatov and the Hearsay of Memory This essay appears as an afterword to the novel “Pushkin Hills,” by Sergei Dovlatov, which will be published this week by Counterpoint Press. “You’ve just forgotten. ...Continue Reading >> ...Continue Reading >> April 6, 2014
Depression Part Two I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler. I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was. But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same. I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything. At first, though, the invulnerability that accompanied the detachment was exhilarating. The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief. Which leads to horrible, soul-decaying boredom.
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