When I was 16 or so, I took out a book of criticism by Harold Bloom. He called J.D. Salinger’s writing juvenile (or something along those lines) and said some other things that I perceived as way too harsh. I remember the shock I felt that a writer I loved so much wasn’t universally admired. I remember exactly where on my bedroom floor I was sitting and how I tossed the book aside towards this child-sized white rocking chair with a doll on it. Things felt different from that point on.
(Tumblr, if you eat this post again, I swear to God…)
This is the first issue of Revolver, a literary magazine based in Minneapolis.
I wrote a more detailed description earlier, but Tumblr trashed it. I’m too lazy and aggravated to retype it, so I’ll just say that it’s pretty good. Besides writing, there are illustrations and a glossy color section of drawings.
"There is certainly no absolute vision of our own place in the tiny corner of the universe which we fill. We make our own vision; it is either accepted by others, altered or discounted. What others do to our vision of ourselves is only important economically speaking. (Thus whether I think I can write books or not, my publisher’s opinion thereon is what buys shoes.)"
— Martha Gellhorn
Confession
I often used to confuse Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Because of the three name thing and the Jonathan thing and the white male genius thing.
This dude is distraught over the amount of truth in fiction.
The thought came to me in a most articulate way: “How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century. ” That I was a woman and living in the twentieth century were plain facts. That I was an artist was a conviction so strong that I never thought of doubting it then or since; and so, as I stood on the pathway in Hyde Park in that September of 1949, there were as good as three facts converging quite miraculously upon myself and I went on my way rejoicing.
