Where I'm reading from
Subtitle: the changing world of books
By: Tim Parks
Series: New York Review Books collections; New York Review Books collection
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
ISBN-13: 9781590178843
Subjects: Books and reading; Authorship; Fiction
Description: "Why do we need fiction? Why do books need to be printed on paper, copyrighted, read to the finish? Why should a group of aging Swedish men determine what "world" literature is best? Do books change anything? Did they use to? Do we read to challenge our vision of the world or to confirm it? Has novel writing turned into a job like any other? In Where I'm Reading From, the internationally acclaimed novelist and critic Tim Parks ranges over a lifetime of critical reading--from Leopardi, Dickens and Chekhov, to Woolf, Lawrence and Bernhard, and on to contemporary work by Jonathan Franzen, Peter Stamm, and many others--to overturn many of our long-held assumptions about literature and its purpose. Taking the form of thirty-eight interlocking essays, Where I'm Reading From examines the rise of the "global" novel and the disappearance of literary styles that do not travel; the changing vocation of the writer today; the increasingly paradoxical effects of translation; the shifting expectations we bring to fiction; the growing stasis of literary criticism; and the problematic relationship between writers' lives and their work. In the end Parks wonders whether writers--and readers--can escape the twin pressures of the new global system and the novel that has become its emblematic genre. "--
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Part I: The World Around the Book 1; title: 1. Do We Need Stories? 3; title: 2. Why Finish Books? 9; title: 3. E-books are for Grown-ups 15; title: 4. Does Copyright Matter? 19; title: 5. The Dull New Global Novel 25; title: 6. Reading It Wrong 29; title: 7. Why Readers Disagree 35; title: 8. Where I'm Reading From 41; title: Part II: The Book in the World 47; title: 1. What's Wrong with the Nobel? 49; title: 2. A Game without Rules 55; title: 3. Most Favored Nations 61; title: 4. Writing Adrift in the World 67; title: 5. Art That Stays Home 73; title: 6. Writing without Style 81; title: 7. Literature and Bureaucracy 89; title: 8. In the Chloroformed Sanctuary 95; title: 9. Writers into Saints 101; title: Part III: The Writer's World 107; title: 1. The Writer's Job 109; title: 2. Writing to Win 117; title: 3. Does Money Make Us Write Better? 123; title: 4. Fear and Courage 129; title: 5. To Tell and Not to Tell 137; title: 1. Stupid Questions 143; title: 2. The Chattering Mind 149; title: 3. Trapped inside the Novel 155; title: 4. Changing Our Stories 161; title: 5. Writing to Death 167; title: Part IV: writing across worlds 173; title: 1. 'Are You the Tim Parks Who...?' 175; title: 2. Ugly Americans Abroad 181; title: 3. Your English Is Showing 189; title: 4. Learning to Speak American 195; title: 5. In Praise of the Language Police 201; title: 6. Translating in the Dark 207; title: 7. Listening for the Jabberwock 213; title: 8. In the Wilds of Leopardi 219; title: 9. Echoes from the Gloom 227; title: 10. My Novel, Their Culture 233.