“If they find a copy of Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, they buy it. It is as if they’ve found a baby on the front step. They peek inside, examine the dog-earing, the marginal scribbles. Or perhaps it’s a clean copy, which carries its own kind of sadness. In either case, they embrace it, though they already have multiple copies. Those are irrelevant to the one they would be abandoning if they left the book behind. This is a hostess gift you can give any fiction writer, guaranteed to delight her even though she already has it. Regifting becomes an act of spreading civilization.”

— The Book Bench: “Poets Go to Bed Earliest”: Ann Beattie’s 7 Truths About Writers : The New Yorker

“After all, what people like about post-“Sopranos” cable TV — its complexity, its density, its moral ambiguity or even depravity — lines up with what they like about literary fiction. […] Novelists who used to lament the rise of television now want a chance to write for it, and that says something about the evolution of cable TV — and maybe about the evolution of literary authorship”

— The Channeling of the Novel - NYTimes.com