Sorry about the light posting - I've been traveling. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing about air-travel (besides the safety aspect) is that I get to read novels. For some reason, I've decided that I can't work or sleep on planes, so I always make sure that my carry-on bag is stuffed full of fiction. On my last flight, I consumed Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. I won't bore you with my praise, but it's a remarkable collection of short stories. The sheer fluidity and poise of her writing is, as a fellow writer, somewhat depressing. She makes it look so easy. I'm really curious about her early drafts, and how she pares down her prose, so that it's so precise and taut.
Profile
Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, and the New York Times and is a contributor to Radiolab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
My Books
Search
Recent Posts
- Goodbye Scienceblogs
- Twitter Strangers
- Stress
- Smart Babies
- Political Dissonance
- Will I?
- Cages and Cancer
- Soda
- LSD
- Alcoholism
Archives
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
« Mind Control by Cell Phone | Main | GPS Sucks »
Plane Reading
Posted on: May 9, 2008 12:02 PM, by Jonah Lehrer
Find more posts in: 
Humanities & Social Science
Humanities & Social ScienceTrackbacks
Trackback URL for this entry: http://scienceblogs.com/mt/pings/71477
2
I also really enjoyed Unaccustomed Earth. I haven't yet been able to shake the stories out of myself. I appreciate Khalid's post, because if I were going to pick a word to desribe her writing I would have said intuitive.
3
You can't praise it enough really. It's both ordinary and exotic at the same time. How does she do that?
4
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll have to pick it up. For a good book about the reading and writing process I recommend Elaine Scarry's, "Dreaming by the Book."
Post a Comment
(Email is required for authentication purposes only. On some blogs, comments are moderated for spam, so your comment may not appear immediately.)
Comments (4)
Jill: How much do you revise, generally?
Lahiri: That's really all I do. It's all a process for me of continued revision. I worked on most of the stories in this book for several years. When I finished some, and I published some, along the way, then I considered them done, but I still worked on them for a considerable length of time, and the ones I didn't publish, I continued to work on. Most of these stories were simmering for two to three years, minimum.
Jill: Do you think about the architecture, or shape, of these stories, while you're writing them?
Lahiri: I think about the structure, sure. I think about what's going to happen, and how it's going to happen, and the pace. But I think if I stop to think about it in an abstract sense, I feel very daunted. I just try to enter into the story and feel my way through it. It's a very murky, intuitive way of going about it.
http://www.powells.com/authors/jhumpalahiri.html
Posted by: Khalid | May 9, 2008 1:56 PM