The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
Master of horror Stephen King tells Agence France-Presse what he is most scared of: "I'm afraid of Alzheimer's. Declining mental ability, that scares the heck out of me."
Casey N. Cep considers Flannery O'Connor's A Prayer Journal: "The journal is chiefly an interior one, a record of a Christian who hoped the rightful orientation of her own life would contribute to righting the orientation of the world. O'Connor yearns for prayer to come effortlessly, even while exerting great intellectual effort to understand and induce it. 'Prayer should be composed I understand of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication and I would like to see what I can do with each without an exegesis.' Confessing that her mind 'is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery,' she asks for a faith motivated by love, not fear: 'Give me the grace, dear God, to adore You, for even this I cannot do for myself.' "
Daniel Mendelsohn, writing with Francine Prose on authors who use pseudonyms, argues that literary critics should consider an author's reputation and entire oeuvre, not just the book in front of them: "The critical urge to see family resemblances in an author's work arises from a psychological insight: The creative mind is, like all minds, coherent, even if its coherences aren't apparent. Like a psychotherapist, the critic looks for patterns, themes and repetitions not only within a work but across an artist's career in order to uncover the hidden unities."
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