From this episode
Recommended books
Don Quixote (Penguin Classics)
Authors:
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra,
John Rutherford,
Roberto González Echevarría
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray—he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants—Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together-and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years. With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. This Penguin Classics edition, with its beautiful new cover design, includes John Rutherford's masterly translation, which does full justice to the energy and wit of Cervantes's prose, as well as a brilliant critical introduction by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarriá.
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Temple of Texts: Essays (American Literature Series)
Authors:
William H. Gass,
MR William H Gass PhD
Winner of the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, "A Temple of Texts" is the latest critical collection from one of America's greatest essayists and novelists. Here, William H.
Winner of the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, "A Temple of Texts" is the latest critical collection from one of America's greatest essayists and novelists. Here, William H. Gass pays homage to the readerly side of the literary experience by turning his critical sensibility upon all the books that shaped his own development as a reader, writer, and human being. With essays on figures ranging from William Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein to Flann O'Brien and Robert Burton, Gass creates a "temple" of readerly devotion, a collection of critical explorations as brilliant and incisive as readers have come to expect from this literary master, but also a surprisingly personal window into the author's own literary development.
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The Macguffin
Authors:
Stanley Elkin,
Chirs Lehmann
Bobbo Druff, the fifty-eight-year-old commissioner of streets, finds his ordinary life turned upside down by a series of bizarre events and the people in his life--his wife, his son, his new lover, and his chauffeur
Bobbo Druff, the fifty-eight-year-old commissioner of streets, finds his ordinary life turned upside down by a series of bizarre events and the people in his life--his wife, his son, his new lover, and his chauffeur
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Episode overview
Recently, I picked up Jeff Tweedy’s “How to Write One Song.” It was a bit of a lark. Tweedy is the frontman for Wilco, one of my favorite bands, but I’m not a songwriter, and I don’t plan to become one. But, unexpectedly, I loved the book. It’s the most generous and approachable guide to the creative process I’ve read.
It’s also relentlessly practical: To Tweedy, this really is a process, replete with practices that you can enjoy doing daily. As a writer of a very different sort, I’ve had a blast with them.
So I asked Tweedy to come on the show to talk about creativity, ands his approach to it. He debunks the idea that suffering is necessary (or even useful) for the creative process, talks through his relentless search for inspiration, sings and analyzes a few of my favorite songs, analyzes his relationship with his mother, shares some of his tricks for finding fresh language for old ideas and even convinces me to write some poetry.
This is a fun one.
Book recommendations:
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
A Temple of Texts by William H. Gass
The MacGuffin by Stanley Elkin