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Adam Levin discusses some novels that influenced him. The Roth and Wallace are no surprise, but it was a revelation to find Kosinski’s (riveting, controversial) The Painted Bird on the list.

Can a novelist write philosophically? Even some of those considered among the most philosophical have “answered with an emphatic no.” See also Percy & Kierkegaard.

“Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.” — Reynolds Price (February 1, 1933 – January 20, 2011)

“Twain is the day, Melville the night.” Roberto Bolaño on the influence of the “two main lines of the American novel”: he preferred Melville, but said he owed a greater debt to Twain. (Via; see also.)

“We see over and over love meeting pain, silence meeting silence, silence meeting nothing at all.” Elizabeth Bachner reads Ingeborg Bachmann-Paul Celan: Correspondence, letters and gaps spanning 20+ years.

“The material was so hot that it deformed the writing whenever I came at it directly.” The Paris Review excerpts parts of its interview with Jonathan Franzen.

Paris Review editor Lorin Stein “will happily quote your favorite poem” or “write whatever you tell me to, as long as it’s non-actionable and clean” on your holiday subscription card. (See also.)

Muriel Spark turned to novels late and easily could have ended up not writing them at all. Good thing her friend Tony Strachan “positively nagged me about the waste of my talent.” (Thanks, Amitava.)

From Hawthorne to Twain to White to Roth: if American fiction and personal essays “are at times nearly impossible to distinguish,” it’s “because they share a common ancestor.” (Thanks, NYRB.)

The Millions’ excellent Year in Reading series — featuring new discoveries from writers and critics, including John Banville, Fiona Maazel, and Stephen Dodson — begins for 2010.

“Why is it that as soon as you hand [your draft] to a reader, you get your best ideas for the story and you want to snatch it out of their hands and make them wait for the results of the next round of revisions?”

Joshua Cohen characterizes The Instructions as “a very long joke … that lacks a punch line.” I can see not buying the voice, but, for whatever my goyishe perspective is worth, I completely disagree with his reading.

Q: What distracts you from writing? A: Thoughts of money and death, and … the sexiest painting I know. — From a John Banville Q&A. See also Banville on death: not fear but fury.

James Baldwin, “like Emerson, renounced the pulpit—he had been a fiery boy preacher in Harlem—and readers have found in the writings of each the atmosphere of church.”

Jessa, on our often-conflicting tastes: “one of us will be ecstatic about a book, and the other politely says, ‘Yeah, I didn’t read that one.’” See also. Takeaway: read Somerset Maugham.

“[O]ne of the great failings of literary theory has been that the writing is not only impersonal, it also seeks mightily to be free of contradictions.” –Amitava Kumar

Mark Twain “is akin not only to Swift as a satirist, but also to Tolstoy and Dickens in his feelings for — and against — humanity, and to Chaucer and Shakespeare in his stature.”

The C.I.A. is suing a former agent over his exposé, Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. He talks with Gregory Levey at The New Yorker.

Like the narrator of his new novel, The Instructions, Adam Levin “wanted to be the Jewish Messiah” as a kid. “I could beat up everyone in my grade,” he says. (Via.)

Elaine Showalter is surprised so few reviewers of Philip Roth’s Nemesis have mentioned that it’s “a brilliant and compassionate American re-imagining of Albert Camus’s The Plague.” (Via.)

Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary collects the notes he wrote after his mother’s death. Dwight Garner says its “unvarnished quality is the source of its wrecking cumulative power.”

I knew Donna Tartt, a huge fan of Charles Portis, wrote the afterward to the reissued True Grit. I didn’t know that she read for the audiobook. Might be the first one I ever listen to. See also Tartt on being read to as a child.

Part of the pleasure of reading MFK Fisher’s 1942 hard-times survival guide, How to Cook a Wolf, comes from the withering commentary/self-rebuttal she added for the 1952 edition.

Can a writer get through Somerset Maugham’s (hilariously scathing) Cakes and Ale without reading whole passages to others? Exhibit B; Exhibit A. Try it; let me know how you fare.

“Show me a novel that’s not comic and I’ll show you a novel that’s not doing its job.” Howard Jacobson on the devaluation of humor in literature. See also Jacobson for Beginners.