Authors Electric

Who doesn’t love a good brawl between writers…from the safety of the stands? Though the bad boy glory days are gone in our cancel ’em corporate culture, not long ago bad press and scandal were generally tickets to ride.              Ernest Hemingway knocked the stuffing out of the twenty-years-older Wallace Stevens and went on to boast about it. He hit Max Eastman on the head with a heavy tome after  Max claimed in a review that Hem wore glued-on chest hair. And he got good press, though he lost, from his boxing match with Morley Callahan.             Norman Mailer, Hem’s disciple, headbutted Gore Vidal in a TV interview. Norm went on to stab his wife and pound for fifteen minutes on Thomas Pynchon’s door, enraged by a bad review–only to learn that Pynchon had fled down the back fire escape.             Hunter...

There were lots of little steps along the way to my becoming a real writer, from getting my hands on notebooks and pencils at primary school, to joining a writers’ group, to getting my first novel published, but I didn’t do this by myself. Like a ball on a bagatelle board, I’ve often been pushed to the next step by something I’ve read, words that became mantras, or by mentors, wonderful people without whom I doubt I would ever have become a writer. Like thousands of others, I’m a huge fan of the ‘The Voice’.  The Voice UK judges 2014: courtesy of telegraph.co.uk For anyone who hasn’t seen this tv show, it’s a competition to find the next superstar singer, judged by four famous singers who don’t set eyes on the contestant until they’ve chosen them to go on, solely on the sound of their singing. I like the banter among the judges, I like will i.am’s mad metaphors and Kylie’s rain dance, even Tom Jones’s name-dropping. He’s sung with Elvis, you know! But what impresses me mos...