writers vs. critics then--and now. Writers are encouraged (expected! in some cases) to be personalities online. So . . . does that mean responding to reviews, or not?

Similarly with fantasy fiction: it looks superficially like an escapist form and is frequently dismissed as such, but that is a mistake. One of the values of this kind of reading is that it takes advantage of the fact that stories can never be entirely contained.

A terrific essay at Strange Horizons by Catherine Butler (steepholm).

Catherine Butler, who is a writer as well as an academic and a critic, published this article about authors as critics of their own work, and critical authority at large.
Authors of fiction have traditionally occupied an ambiguous critical position. They are often assumed to have special expertise regarding their own work, yet their very intimacy ( Read more... )

calimac riffs today on peake's post on being reviewed instead of being the reviewer, specifically, what do you do (if anything) if people read something in your text that you didn't put there? Can you respond?
( Read more... )

Ordinarily I have pedestrian dreams, which I consciously sort through and then drag and drop to the mental recycle bin come morning, but last night's image of Jessie L. Weston with a tongue of fire over her head, driving in a chariot race between Aristotle and Demosthenes, and winning, was remarkable enough to mention at least in passing ( Read more... )

Very migrainy today, alas, but I want to put out a heads up for those readers who don't overlap with peake--

Here's a bit from his discussion on criticism and reviewing:

Every time you read a book you enter upon a journey of exploration. If you have never read the book before, regardless of whether you have read about it, you are in a trackless waste ( Read more... )