Цитаты из книги A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

He has a mushroom-shaped head, ink-black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as I’ve ever seen outside a Graduate Writing Program.

[Tennis Canada logo] - which obtrudes into your visual field as often as is possible here at the du Maurier Omnium - consists of the good old Canadian maple leaf with a tennis racquet for a stem. It’s stuff like that you want to point to when Canadians protest that they don’t understand why Americans make fun of them.

The power-baseline game itself has been compared to Metal or Grunge. But what a top P.B.er really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It’s awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.

The term “seeding” comes from British horticulture and is pretty straightforward. A player seeded First is expected statistically to win, Second to reach the finals, Third and Fourth the semis, etc. A player who reaches the round his seed designates is said to have “justified his seed,” a term that seems far more rich in…

I’m fresh in from the East Coast to go to the Illinois State Fair for a swanky East-Coast magazine. Why exactly a swanky East-Coast magazine is interested in the Illinois State Fair remains unclear to me. I suspect that every so often editors at these magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90% of the…

It won’t do, then, for the literary establishment simply to complain that, for instance, young-written characters don’t have very interesting dialogues with each other, that young writers’ ears seem “tinny.” Tinny they may be, but the truth is that, in younger Americans’ experience, people in the same room don’t do all…

In one of the graduate workshops I went through, a certain gray eminence kept trying to convince us that a literary story or novel should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically…