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At the New York Times’ Room for Debate, some of my thoughts on literary prizes. (And on only recently discovering Rabindranath Tagore.)

For Tin House’s site, I write about finding solace for the slow pace of my own novel in the writing of Donna Tartt and my friend Alexander Chee.

“Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life.” Please get to know Ellen Ullman’s novelistic and critical brilliance (which I discuss at length at Salon) if you haven’t yet.

“The model I saw was that a writer was someone who sat at the table writing.” At B&N Review, I talk with writer, bartender, and NYT Mag drink columnist Rosie Schaap about her new book Drinking With Men.

Broken Twitter plugin, y’all. If you’re used to reading my tweets here, you’ll have to go over there until I figure out what’s going on.

I’ve been spending more time at my Tumblr recently. Over the years it’s come to feel like a better place for bloggy stuff that doesn’t fit on Twitter or warrant a longer post here.

“I was making a film about a local author when I met Harry Crews. He was not my subject; he was my subject’s inspiration. ‘You oughta put a camera on this guy,’ the local author urged.” How Gary Hawkins ended up making a film about Harry Crews.

I wrote about Mary McCarthy’s dissertation-worthy The Group for Bookforum’s summer Money issue. Print only, for now at least. Please let her Paris Review interview (with a young Elisabeth Sifton!) whet your appetite.

My friend Philip Connors’ excellent Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout is out in paperback. Our Paris Review interview, which spilled over onto this site, is included.

At Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner wonders “whether, on average, people are lonelier in real life than in novels.”

I spoke with the Nervous Breakdown’s Brad Listi for an hour last month about writing, blogging, day jobs, personal stuff, and why I’m not reviewing nowadays. You can listen at Other People Podcast.

I’m interested in James Wood’s writings on religion, including his novel, The Book Against God, which I read recently. Here he is on Santorum’s attitudes toward the environment. (See also.)

Edward St. Aubyn, whose social comedy is “more reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or Nancy Mitford than of anyone writing today,” appears Upstairs at the Square this Wednesday.

“Once the Virgin Mary was released into the world, the world took her and ran in different directions.” Jessa Crispin ponders religious icons.

Revisiting the problem of overdosing on beloved writers, or, in Matthew Lickona’s case, filmmakers.

“I think if somebody has to make an artistic work, he will finish it no matter what. It has nothing to do with the money, with the time.” — Marjane Satrapi

“American writers alive today are expected to work as if Gertrude Stein never existed. Gertrude Stein, in her time, had that same problem.” (Via. See also.)

Ted Hughes once wrote a letter to his sister about Sylvia Plath’s “good fortune” in selling “a long rather bad poem to The Atlantic Monthly, which is one of the Mags in America.”

Muriel Spark wrote a biography of Mary Shelley, Child of Light, that’s been out of print for years. Won’t someone revive it, as an ebook at least? This fan of both novelists would like to read it.

“What kind of a man wants to put the 10,000 most important books online by 2002 and make them available for free?” Late ’90s Wired article on Project Gutenberg founder Michael S. Hart, who died this week at age 64.

Ernest Hemingway wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald “a cutting letter about [Tender is the Night], accusing him of cheating” by fictionalizing Gerald and Sara Murphy. I’m rereading the fascinating 1962 profile of the couple who inspired Fitzgerald’s flawed masterpiece. (Via.)

“[U]nhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.” — Jeanette Winterson (Thanks, J.)

Exciting: Poet and Silver Jews singer/songwriter/mastermind David Berman has a blog, Menthol Mountains, where he’s pondering “the phony gulp,” hooked-up verse, and other things. (Thanks, 5redpandas.)

What Middletown Read tracks borrowing records of Muncie Public Library patrons from 1891 to 1902 and shows how library use is not a lonely act but “part of the complex story of the social nature of reading.”

I strongly disagree with the idea that “the Christian faith [has] been in full cultural retreat since the 1960s,” but still recommend Robert Fay’s essay about the dearth of Catholic novels after the translation of the Latin Mass.