Mark Twain on Jane Austen: I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

William Faulkner on Mark Twain: A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

Ernest Hemignway on William Faulkner: Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.

Tom Wolfe on Ernest Hemingway: Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he’s easy to read is that he is concise. He isn’t. I hate conciseness — it’s too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using ‘and’ for padding.

John Irving on Tom Wolfe: He doesn’t know how to write fiction, he can’t create a character, he can’t create a situation…You see people reading him on airplanes, the same people who are reading John Grisham, for Christ’s sake….I’m using the argument against him that he can’t write, that his sentences are bad, that it makes you wince. It’s like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine….You know, if you were a good skater, could you watch someone just fall down all the time? Could you do that? I can’t do that.

You can read more examples on the original Examiner article.

The festival promises to be well worth the trip to B.C.’s scenic lakeside town as it brings together a talented group of artists to produce a series of workshops and presentations.  This year’s presenters include Governor General’s Award winner George Bowering, YA/romance author Eileen Cook, and Mona Fertig of Mother Tongue Publishing. Admission to the festival also gives you a 20-minute one-on-one “blue pencil” session where a presenter of your choosing will review some of your writing and offer editing and advice based on their years of experience.

A full weekend pass is only $180, if purchased before May 13, and includes access to all workshops, presentations and signings as well as a Saturday lunch and Sunday breakfast.  Passes can be purchased by completing a registration form on the festival website.

If you can’t make it to the festival the Shushwap Association of Writers also has writing contest open to all BC residents, with the chance to have your work published in the Word on the Lake’ 10th Anniversary Anthology

Presenters at Word on The Lake 2013 include:

Burning Water by George Bowering
George Bowering

Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood
Eileen Cook

Baychimo: Artic Ghost Ship
Anthony Dalton

Whiskey Bullets
Garry Gottfriedson

We Can Be Heroes
Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Outcasts of River Falls
Jacqueline Guest

Cheats, Charlatans, and Chicanery
Andreas Schroeder

Wolves
Daniel Wood

- Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick
- The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright
- State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
- The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
- Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
- Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding

It is the debut novel for Madeline Miller, and the second Esi Edugyan, who has already earned plenty of attention for Half Blood Blues (including a Giller prize). Seasoned veterans Anne Enright and Ann Patchett will be tough to beat. I know little to none about Georgina Harding (which in my experience means she’ll win!). I personally am rooting for Cynthia Ozick, who just turned 84. You go, girl.

The winner will be announced at an award ceremony on May 30th, 2012.

One of Smith’s aims is to challenge the view popularised by writers such as Malcolm Gladwell that what really makes the difference to success is practice and hard work. Smith thinks that downplays the good fortune of those who have the genetic and social advantages to be able to undertake the hard work. This is true enough, but the comparison with Gladwell highlights what’s really wrong with this book. Partly it’s a sense that the genre is starting to cannibalise itself. There is a world of fascinating material out there on luck written by philosophers, novelists, historians – but Smith’s frame of reference is primarily pop psychology books of the past few years. The main problem, though, is that people like Gladwell do it so much better.

This literary phenomenon covers many genres. We don’t hesitate for a second when a child’s toy or a rabbit or Dora’s backpack speaks and offers some words of wisdom. There’s a lot of classics on this page but they are not all children’s titles. Read the article.

Henley was a friend of the author, and had a wooden leg and a booming personality. He also edited an edition of Robert Burns’ poetry and wrote an afterword for an edition of Treasure Island. The tale of pirates and adventure is back in the news because Andrew Motion is bringing out a sequel to the classic novel.

Like many other characters in Stevenson, Silver is of great medical interest, for he was modelled on or inspired by Stevenson’s friend W E Henley, the poet and journalist, now mainly remembered for his poem Invictus, the last stanza of which is: “It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll. / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.”

This is not mere Victorian uplift: Henley knew whereof he spoke, having spent nearly two years in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary having his one remaining leg – the other already having been amputated for tuberculosis of the knee – saved by the great surgeon Joseph Lister, at the expense of immense personal suffering. His wooden leg and expansive personality led Stevenson to write to him: “I will now make a confession. It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver.”

Start with the Brothers Grimm and end up in Ken Kesey’s writing class with this selection of Literary Collaborations. Enjoy.

He wrote three novels – The Long Home, a morality tale set in the Depression, Provinces of Night, Twilight, and two short story collections.

Gay wrote fiction on and off since he was 13, collecting a stack of increasingly encouraging rejection letters. In 1998, when he was 55, he finally got two short stories published in literary magazines.

Amy Williams, a New York literary agent, read one of Gay’s stories, and says, “by the second paragraph, I was sucked in.” When she tracked him down in his hometown of Hohenwald, Tenn., Gay told her he doubted there was much money in “my kind of writing — about marginal people in marginal settings.”