Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Has anyone else read this, or started to? I just picked it up and breezed through the first 60 pages, and I think it's fantastic. Just curious what others' thoughts are about it. (I'll have to finish reading it asap, but I don't mind if you address later parts of the book.)

Okay, how about a snippet or two to whet your appetite?

"The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist" (21).

"I don't want to defend Frey per se --he's a terrible writer -- but the very nearly pornographic obsession with his and similar cases reveals the degree of nervousness on the topic. The whole huge loud roar, as it returns again and again, has to do with the culture being embarrassed at how much it wants the frame of reality and, within that frame, great drama" (35).

"What if America isn't really the sort of the place where a street urchin can charm his way to the top through diligence and talent? What if instead it's the sort of place where heartwarming stories about abused children who triumphed through adversity are made up and marketed?" (36).

"Genre is a minimum-security prison" (70). --That's genre as in "fiction" or "memoir" or "lyric essay," not as in "sci fi" or "romance."

Interesting generalizations. Almost anything you wish to say about America, good, bad, or indifferent, is likely to be true. You can find every evil there if you look hard enough, but you can also find the cures there.

That's an interesting take. I probably didn't provide a very wide sampling of what's in the book, just some points I found interesting. He also makes a case for plagiarism and why it's not so bad and another for blurring genres instead of sticking with traditional novels and stories. Mostly, at least so far (I'm a little past halfway), he seems to be most curious about the intersection of reality and art, both in the lives people live and in the representations we create of them.