IKE: A Novel Experiment, 15 NW Park Avenue Apt 415, Portland, OR (2026)

09/10/2021

***
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
—Mary Oliver

“In a region that has produced most of the nation's poet laureates, it is risky to single out one fragile 71-year-old bard of Provincetown. But Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1983, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural world. Her Wild Geese has become so popular it now graces posters in dorm rooms across the land. But don't hold that against her. Read almost anything in New and Selected Poems. She teaches us the profound act of paying attention—a living wonder that makes it possible to appreciate all the others.”—Renée Loth, Boston Globe, September 2, 2007

08/27/2021

***
“Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.”
—Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson is an award-winning English writer, who became famous with her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against conventional values. Some of her other novels have explored gender polarities and sexual identity.

Other novels of hers have explored gender polarities and sexual identity, and later novels the relations between humans and technology. She is also a broadcaster and a professor of creative writing. She won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St.Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She holds an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Commander of the Order of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

08/17/2021

***
“Writers tend to think they occupy a much more relevant place in society than we actually do. But we really are closer to buffoons and jesters than we are to whistle-blowers or moral guides. Accepting our rather insignificant place in society can be depressing – but it’s also freeing.”
—Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions.

She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant”; the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award; and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award twice and the Kirkus Prize on three occasions. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

08/09/2021

***
“Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can f**k off.”
—Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the release of his third collection The Less Deceived in 1955. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows followed in 1964 and 1974. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as “the nation's best-loved poet” in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest post-war writer.

07/30/2021

***
“For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.”
—William H. Gass

William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor.

Gass has cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he writes “to get even.” Despite his prolific output, he has said that writing is difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to compose.

When writing, Gass typically devotes enormous attention to the construction of sentences, arguing their importance as the basis of his work. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post has called Gass “the finest prose stylist in America.” Much of Gass' work is metafictional.

07/21/2021

***
“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
—Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of these are considered classics of American literature.

07/18/2021

***
“I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.”
—Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Thompson was an American journalist and author, famous for his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become the central figures of their stories. He is also known for his promotion and use of psychedelics and other mind-altering substances (and to a lesser extent, alcohol and fi****ms), his libertarian views, and his iconoclastic contempt for authority. He committed su***de in 2005.

07/10/2021

***
“I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the ‘what happens,’ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.”
—Alice Munro

Alice Munro is a Canadian short story writer. Her work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to “embed more than announce, reveal more than parade.”

Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction", or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov.” Munro has received many literary accolades, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the contemporary short story", and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. She is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General’s Award for fiction, and received the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s 1996 Marian Engel Award and the 2004 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway.

07/09/2021

***
“Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.”
—Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists. She is the author of many novels: Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, Rise and Shine, Every Last One, Still Life with Bread Crumbs, and Miller’s Valley. Her memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, published in 2012, was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Her book A Short Guide to a Happy Life has sold more than a million copies. While a columnist at The New York Times she won the Pulitzer Prize and published two collections, Living Out Loud and Thinking Out Loud. Her Newsweek columns were collected in Loud and Clear.

07/05/2021

***
“I read real books. On paper. You know, those printed books? I feel like this is the last thing I do to support my industry. I think they smell great, too.”
—Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction). His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.

07/04/2021

***
“Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball.”
—Neil Simon

Neil Simon was an American playwright, screenwriter, and author. He wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, mostly film adaptations of his plays. He has received more combined Oscar and Tony Award nominations than any other writer.

His first produced play was Come Blow Your Horn (1961). It took him three years to complete and ran for 678 performances on Broadway. It was followed by two more successes, Barefoot in the Park (1963) and The Odd Couple (1965). He won a Tony Award for the latter. It made him a national celebrity and “the hottest new playwright on Broadway.” From the 1960s to the 1980s he wrote for stage and screen; some of his screenplays were based on his own works for the stage. His style ranged from farce to romantic comedy to more serious dramatic comedy. Overall, he garnered 17 Tony nominations and won three awards. In 1966, he had four successful productions running on Broadway at the same time, and in 1983 he became the only living playwright to have a New York theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre named in his honor.

06/29/2021

***
“A writer, no matter what the context, is made an outsider by the demands of his vocation.”
—Breece D'J Pancake

Breece D’J Pancake was an American short story writer. Pancake was a native of West Virginia. He published six short stories in his lifetime, mostly in The Atlantic Monthly. These stories and six more that had not been published at the time of his death were collected in The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (1983). The volume was reprinted in 2002 with a new afterword by Andre Dubus III. Most of his stories are set in rural West Virginia and revolve around characters and naturalistic settings, often adapted from his own past. His stories received acclaim from readers and critics.

Pancake committed su***de on Palm Sunday, 1979, at the age of 26. His motives for su***de are still somewhat unclear but many speculate the death of his father to alcoholism and the death of his close friend from a gruesome car accident could have had an influence on his choices—his writing style could also prove he was living a haunted life.

Among the writers who claim Pancake as a strong influence are Chuck Palahnuik, and Andre Dubus III. After Pancake's death, Kurt Vonnegut wrote in a letter to John Casey, “I give you my word of honor that he is merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read. What I suspect is that it hurt too much, was no fun at all to be that good. You and I will never know.”

IKE: A Novel Experiment

09/10/2021

08/27/2021

08/17/2021

08/09/2021

07/30/2021

07/21/2021

07/18/2021

07/10/2021

07/09/2021

07/05/2021

07/04/2021

06/29/2021

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Category