The Loneliness Epidemic

I have a guest post up at Geoff Talbot’s creativity blog, Seven Sentences. Check it out, and take a look at what else Geoff’s got up there. It’s well worth your time.

Something I’ve Never Done Before

I finished Constantine’s Sword last night, and I’m now doing something I’ve never done before: reading a Stephen King novel. I read King’s memoir, On Writing (absolutely wonderful), but in my entire life I have never even opened one of his fiction books. Tbe one I’m reading now is one I’ve had on my shelf for several years, thinking I would read it someday: Bag of Bones. It’s not a horror novel. It’s great, so far. I’m really enjoying it.

Readers’ Choice

Mother Jones readers weigh in on their favorite books from 2011. It’s a nice mix of fiction and non-fiction. Lots of books there I’d like to read.

Another Must-Read Book of 2011

I hadn’t heard of it, or the author, but after reading this NPR review by Hector Tobar, I put it on my To Read list (along with The Third Reich, which I mentioned the other day).

People think of Los Angeles as a city without a past. But as a native Angeleno, I stumble upon the relics of its history all the time: the rails of our long-ago vanished street cars embedded in the asphalt, for example, and the mostly vacant towers of stone in our Old Banking District.

There are many novels that can give their readers a sense of what it was like to live in that old L.A., a city of men in fedoras and women in broad-shouldered dresses. But it’s John Fante, largely forgotten outside Los Angeles, who best brings the passion, the possibility and the hurt of that glamorous city to life, specifically with his 1939 novel Ask the Dust.

More at the link.

Writer’s Block

Charlie Jane Anders writes about those times you cannot write (or think you can’t):

Writer’s Block. It sounds like a fearsome condition, a creative blockage. The end of invention. But what is it, really?

Part of why Writer’s Block sounds so dreadful and insurmountable is the fact that nobody ever takes it apart. People lump several different types of creative problems into one broad category. In fact, there’s no such thing as “Writer’s Block,” and treating a broad range of creative slowdowns as a single ailment just creates something monolithic and huge. Each type of creative slowdown has a different cause — and thus, a different solution.

According to Anders, there are 10 kinds of writer’s block. Read on to find out what they are.

A Book About Books

From Brain Pickings:

Books are a tremendous presence and inspiration around here — we’ve previously explored how they’ve been made from the Middle Ages to today, what the future might have in store for them, and why analog books still enchant us. In Books: A Living History, Australian historian Martyn Lyons (of A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World fame) explores how books became one of the most efficient and enduring information technologies ever invented — something we seem to forget in an era plagued by techno-dystopian alarmism about the death of books.

Roberto Bolano’s “The Third Reich” Is “Brutal and Perfect”

The other day I linked to an article at Flavorwire about 10 books that were previously unknown or thought to be lost, and are only now being published. One of them is Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich. Here is a review of the book published at NPR last month.

Unusual Bookstores in Unusual Places

In Quartzsite, Arizona, there is a bookstore. …

Lost and Found

Emily Temple at Flavorwire lists 10 novels that were thought lost, never got published, and are only now seeing the light of day. They are:

Do Editors and Writers Tend To Be Introverts?

Dawn McIlvain Stahl has a fascinating couple of posts on that question, here and here.