The Millions converses with an online book thief:

I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may. . . .

I think that regular people will never feel very guilty “stealing” from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multi-millionaire like [Stephen] King. . . .

One thing that will definitely not change anyone’s mind or inspire them to stop are polemics from people like Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison—attitudes like that ensure that all of their works are available online all of the time.

No matter how many excuses this thief offers, he has none for stealing

I also find it particularly wretched that this thief considers himself the final arbiter of how much money Stephen King should make from writing. What unbelievable arrogance.

Cormac McCarthy interviewed by John Jurgensen of the WSJ:

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

Ha!

A wonderful line from Domenico Starnone’s First Execution:

A first draft is the closest thing there is to life itself as it rains chaotically down upon our heads.

Philip Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus, was published 50 years ago this week. I first read it in tenth grade English class at New Canaan High School. Twenty-eight years later the title story remains a favourite, and the doomed love of Neil and Brenda still tugs at my heart:

What was it inside me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing—who knows—into winning? I was sure I had loved Brenda, though standing there, I knew I couldn’t any longer. And I knew it would be a long while before I made love to anyone the way I had made love to her. With anyone else, could I summon up such a passion? Whatever spawned my love for her, had that spawned such lust too? If she had only been slightly not Brenda . . . but then would I have loved her? I looked hard at the image of me, at that darkening of the glass, and then my gaze pushed through it, over the cool floor, to a broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved.

Sometimes we need not only thank the author who wrote something that remains so indelibly with us but also those who introduced us to such works. Thanks, Dr Benjamin. Yours was the first class that taught me how to read and therefore how to write.

AB Yehoshua’s magnificent novel, A Woman in Jerusalem, proves simplicity of language doesn’t equal simplicity of thought.

Nevertheless, at a time when pedestrians were routinely exploding in the streets, troubled consciences turned up in the oddest places.

A perfect novel for beginning writers to study the dictum “less is more.”

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2008, on writers:

Solitude will be his lot in life. It always has been. As a child, he was a fragile, anxious, excessively receptive boy, or the girl described by Colette, who cannot help but watch as her parents tear each other apart, her big black eyes enlarged with a sort of painful attentiveness. Solitude is affectionate to writers, and it is in the company of solitude that they find the essence of happiness. It is a contradictory happiness, a mixture of pain and delight, an illusory triumph, a muted, omnipresent torment, not unlike a haunting little tune. The writer, better than anyone, knows how to cultivate the vital, poisonous plant, the one that grows only in the soil of his own powerlessness. The writer wanted to speak for everyone, and for every era: there he is, there she is, each alone in a room, facing the too-white mirror of the blank page, beneath the lampshade distilling its secret light. Or sitting at the too-bright screen of the computer, listening to the sound of one’s fingers clicking over the keys. This, then, is the writer’s forest. And each writer knows every path in that forest all too well. If, now and again, something escapes, like a bird flushed by a dog at dawn, then the writer looks on, amazed—this happened merely by chance, in spite of oneself.

James Wood revisits Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, the great American novel of the suburbs:

“Revolutionary Road” is a brilliant rewriting of “Madame Bovary,” with one signal difference—at the end of Flaubert’s novel, both Emma and Charles Bovary lose, because she commits suicide and her dull husband is utterly bereft. In Yates’s savage inversion, the wife loses but the dull husband secretly wins: though deprived of wife and children, he prospers at work, and finally secures for himself the safe, settled world that his wife died trying to dislodge.

If I’d never read Revolutionary Road, chances are I’d’ve enjoyed AMC’s Mad Men rather than viewing it as a watered-down version of Yates’ “indictment of American life in the nineteen-fifties.”