January 28, 2012
Currently Reading
And I highly recommend.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:50 PM
February 14, 2009
35 Years of Editing Updike
He wanted to see each galley, each tiny change, right down to the late-closing page proofs, which he often managed to return by overnight mail an hour or so before closing, with new sentences or passages, handwritten in the margins in a soft pencil, that were fresher and more inventive and revealing than what had been there before. You watched him write. This process sounds old-fashioned, but Updike was probably the very first New Yorker writer to shift over to a computer, back in the early eighties. “I don’t know how this will change my writing,” he wrote to me in advance, “but it will.” He was right, of course: the flavor was mysteriously different, the same wine but of another year.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:40 PM
January 2, 2009
Richard Yates
Every young writer wants to create The Great American Novel. With Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates did, and the upcoming movie will bring much-deserved attention to Yates, whose work has not received the general acclaim it should. Along with Revolutionary Road, Yates also wrote an absolutely brilliant and heartbreaking collection of stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. You can read an excellent primer of Yates' life and work here. There's also a modest but nicely assembled tribute site to Yates here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:34 PM
September 11, 2008
More Cormac McCarthy
Currently reading, er, re-reading, All the Pretty Horses. This was a delightful little senior moment. I knew I had the book when I bought the second and third book in the Border Trilogy this weekend, knowing I already had Horses. I had just forgotten I read it until I got about 20 pages into it on the subway this morning. But it's so darn good, I kept reading.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:23 PM