I’m in an anthology you can buy on Amazon
Plus I finished graduate school today.
Woo.
::dives back into the abyss::
Anonymous asked: why do you constaly DEFACE ur books
“If your parents don’t teach you how to live, you learn it from books; and clever people watch you, to learn from your mistakes.”
- An Experiment in Love, Hillary Mantel
California Prose Directory: Contributor Profile: Sarah LaBrie
Sarah LaBrie is a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University. In our very first Contributor Profile, she talks about the Coast Starlight, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Krysten Ritter, and Walter Benjamin. LaBrie’s story, “In the City of Our Lady the Queen,” which will be…
Anonymous asked: What did you study in college?
Comparative Literature. One time my college boyfriend slipped up and called in Competitive Literature, and, for better or worse, that made a lot of sense to me at the time.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said that one of your commitments in writing is strict attention to the individual sentence.
HEMPEL
Yes. Writing conducted at the sentence level has always made perfect sense to me. Allan Gurganus put it very well. He was sitting on a panel on the novel with Stanley Elkin and several others, and there was all this talk about theories of novels and he said, There are those of us who are still loyal at the level of the sentence. That’s the great attraction and motivation. That’s what gets me in, writing or reading. Though it’s unlikely you’ll write something nobody has ever heard of, the way you have a chance to compete is in the way you say it. Now I’ve been writing for almost twenty years, and I still feel the same way. That is how I assemble stories—me and a hundred million other people—at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said you can’t bear to have a bad sentence in front of you.
HEMPEL
Yes. I still can’t. Makes me ill.
Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project
Current reading list includes: Last 250 pages of Kafka on the Shore by Murakami, NW by Zadie Smith, Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg, Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye, Kafka essay and “Task of the Translator” in Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal, This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, Two Novels by Alain Robbe Grillet, Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, Wuthering Heights (in anticipation of seeing the movie), Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, After Nature and Austerlitz by Sebald, last 50 or so pages of The Bathroom by Jean-Phillipe Toussaint.
Leaving the Strand tonight, I set off the alarm. I opened my backpack and when the security guard saw what was in it (the three books I’d binge bought from Barnes and Noble that morning to read and then return, plus four I’d just checked out from the NYU library) he gave me an aggrieved look and waved me through. #YouKnowYouHaveAProblemWhen
