In Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don't Publish (University of Georgia Press), Mr. Weber studies the cases of four fiction writers, two living and two dead, who famously stopped writing and publishing: Tillie Olsen, Henry Roth, J.D. Salinger, and Ralph Ellison. Each author produced significant early work, then spent years or decades not delivering on that promise.
...
"These authors' disparate silences were shaped, sold, and consumed in the literary marketplace," Mr. Weber writes. "In 20th- and early-21st-century America, unproductive writers have been able to command serious critical attention and remain celebrities by offering the public volumes of silence, which have been read and interpreted like any other text."(Another great article via
Bookslut)
# posted by
Gerry Canavan @ 3:00 PM
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