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Interesting question. I believe reading tastes start evolving from the first books we read. Who we read in our childhood tends to define us, since they launch us on the road to writers of similar tastes. I can tell you most of my favorite writers - Borges, Saramago, García Márquez, Buzzati...

Are we talking about literature or non-fiction included?

I read: Assis, Machado de: Dom Casmurro Buzzati, Dino: The Tartar Steppe Casares, Adolfo Bioy: Dream of Heroes Chesterton, G.K.: The Complete Father Brown Stories Dostoevsky, Fyodor: A Weak Heart Kundera, Milan: The Joke Márquez, Gabriel García: Leaf Storm Queiroz, Eça de: To the...

I can understand this, the anxiety of thinking everything you'll write will turn out awful, and wanting to avoid the act itself. But having the discipline to persevere anyway, I think that's a sign that you take writing seriously.

Gore Vidal once complained about that fact that American literature was only interested in writing about the 'Great American Experience', or something like that. And isn't that true? Aren't Irish, Italians, Jews, etc. obliged to write what it's like to be an [adjective]-American in America? and...

Well, Gore Vidal supported himself during the '50s writing for Hollywood: he's one of the uncredited screenwriters of Ben-Hur. So I guess he'd have wonderful, sordid stories to tell about Tinsel Town. Some of his essays about this topic are hilarious. As a prose writer, what do you think of...

But that's my point: a writer who has it in him the will to be a writer, will feel like writing at all times. Maybe I'm a Romantic, but I think a writer is a person for whom writing is the air he breathes: without it, he dies. If he can live without it, maybe he isn't really into it.

If we are to believe Philip Roth's own words, he's also read little of the literature of the age. So I guess it's a tie.

It's such a free adaptation, it doesn't even have to have the same point.

But isn't deadlines something the writer only has to be worried about after he's published his first work?

Horace Engdahl looks like a charming man, doesn't he?

In order to celebrate my enrollment and first day in my MA in American Literature, I went shopping: The Great Shadow & other stories, Mário de Sá-Carneiro Kaputt, Curzio Malaparte If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino The House on the...

I wonder if a writer who seriously contemplates the act of writing wouldn't intuitively labor on these aspects in order to improve. Not even the greatest of writers is born that way, but I assume there's an inner need that sets him apart from mere hobby writing.

Are you talking about college in general or just these writers' programs?

I always have time for Agatha Christie. Last year she was the writer I read the most, seven novels. They're quick, captivating reads, and no matter how much I think her characters and writing is poor, once she gets the mystery in motion, I can't stop reading. Some of her mysteries end up...

Well, you can't study him without reading him first :D Recently I acquired a complete collection of his short-stories, but reading them filled me with disappointment. He just doesn't strike me as great as he used to do when I was younger and discovering the joys of reading.

Yesterday I got: The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino Letter on Happiness, Epicurus The Gods of Pegana, Lord Dunsany The Sword of Welleran & Other Stories, Lord Dunsany

That's certainly not how I remember my childhood summers on the farm :lol: I don't see any relation between agriculture and poetry. I'm sure in the agrarian 19th-century America, literature inevitably came from some farmers. But I don't think TS Eliot, Fernando Pessoa or Pablo Neruda ever saw...

Just got: L'Ingenu, Voltaire The City and the Mountains, Eça de Queiroz

I think only city folks who've never had to dig holes in hard soil, milk cows, collect eggs, toil the ground, plant seeds, etc., would think that farm work allows time for idle philosophical reflections :lol: I'll have to ask again, what poets are we talking about here? This thread is so...