Where I'm Reading From The Changing World of Books

by Parks, Tim

• ISBN13: 9781590178843
• ISBN10: 159017884X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-05-12
• Publisher: New York Review Books

Summary

Why do we need fiction? Why do books need  to be printed on paper, copyrighted, read to the finish? 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 novelist and critic Tim Parks ranges over decades of critical reading—from Leopardi, Dickens, and Chekhov, to Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Bernhard, and on to contemporary work by Peter Stamm, Alice Munro, and many others—to upend our assumptions about literature and its purpose.

In thirty-seven interlocking essays, Where I’m Reading From examines the rise of the “international” novel and the disappearance of “national” literary styles; how market forces shape “serious” fiction; the unintended effects of translation; the growing stasis of literary criticism; and the problematic relationship between writers’ lives and their work. Through dazzling close readings and probing self-examination, 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.

Author Biography

Tim Parks has written seventeen novels, including Europa, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and most recently, Painting Death. He is the author of several works of non-fiction, including Italian Neighbors and Italian Ways. Parks has also translated the works of Alberto Moravia, Giacomo Leopardi, and Niccolò Machiavelli, among others, and he is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He lives in Italy.

Table of Contents

Part I: The World Around the Book 1


   1.  Do We Need Stories? 3
   2.  Why Finish Books? 9
   3.  E-books are for Grown-ups 15
   4. Does Copyright Matter? 19
   5.  The Dull New Global Novel 25
   6.  Reading It Wrong 29
   7.  Why Readers Disagree 35
   8. Where I’m Reading From 41
Part II: The Book in the World 47


   1.  What’s Wrong with the Nobel? 49
   2.  A Game without Rules 55
   3.  Most Favored Nations 61
   4.  Writing Adrift in the World 67
   5.  Art That Stays Home 73
   6.  Writing without Style 81
   7.  Literature and Bureaucracy 89
   8.  In the Chloroformed Sanctuary 95
   9. Writers into Saints 101
Part III: The Writer’s World 107


   1. The Writer’s Job 109
   2.  Writing to Win 117
   3.  Does Money Make Us Write Better? 123
   4.  Fear and Courage 129
   5.  To Tell and Not to Tell 137



   1.  Stupid Questions 143
   2.  The Chattering Mind 149
   3.  Trapped inside the Novel 155
   4.  Changing Our Stories 161
   5.  Writing to Death 167
Part IV: writing across worlds 173


   1. ‘Are You the Tim Parks Who...?’ 175
   2.  Ugly Americans Abroad 181
   3. Your English Is Showing 189
   4.  Learning to Speak American 195
   5.  In Praise of the Language Police 201
   6.  Translating in the Dark 207
   7.  Listening for the Jabberwock 213
   8.  In the Wilds of Leopardi 219
   9.  Echoes from the Gloom 227
   10.  My Novel, Their Culture 233