1 March 2012
The very smart and thoughtful Lisa Peet of Like Fire tells us a happy-ending story (boy, don’t we need it?) about late-bloomer Walker Percy, over at The Millions. On writing The Moviegoer, at age 44:
I can only report that something did happen and it happened all of a sudden. Other writers have reported a similar experience. It is not like learning a skill or a game at which, with practice, one gradually improves. One works hard all right, but what comes, comes all of a sudden and as a breakthrough. One hits on something… It is almost as if the discouragement were necessary, that one has first to encounter despair before one is entitled to hope.
I have four of Percy’s books on my shelf and haven’t read any of them. He’s been on my must-read list for years. Not sure what the hang-up is. At the moment it’s (lack of) time, but I’m newly inspired to get on it.
1 December 2011
Lisa Peet, whose blog Like Fireyou should add to our blog feed, contributes to our “Post-40 Bloomers” series at The Millions with a terrific piece on Isak Dinesen.
News Rolls In
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17 March 2010
MORE Magazine featured Long for This World as a “Books We’re Buzzing About.” Check it out. I admit it’s nice to have one’s book associated with the word “buzz.”
At Open Letters Monthly/Like Fire, a lovely, crisply-written, and astute review of Long for This World. It’s wonderful when you feel a reviewer (Lisa Peet) really “got” your book and is even able to articulate (better than you yourself) the subterranean emotions and themes that you care about most. Here’s the intro to the review:
When a novel, particularly a debut novel, is referred to as “ambitious,” there’s usually an implicit “but” present. In Long for This World, Sonya Chung takes on the dynamics of family—what draws it together and what pulls it apart—through the eyes of a number of players, male and female, old and young, Korean and Korean-American. Both her subject matter and her approach are ambitious, to say the least. The only “but” in my reaction, however, is but she pulls it off—and admirably.
