M. Allen Cunningham's Blog

• In Defense of Reliant Novels (Historical, Biographical, or Lit-Spinoffs)

  April 9, 2008

  • Every fictional narrative, whether or not emergent from an actual history or preexisting story, will lay down its own laws. ... Over at the Critical Mass literary blog, one of the current PEN/Faulkner Award judges, Molly Giles, offers a glimpse of her experience sorting through the boxes and boxes of books by prospective awardees. Her observations are interesting, and strike me as much more ...
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• An Interview About Rilke & Lost Son

  March 20, 2008

  • Some time ago, Kay Callison interviewed me about Lost Son for a podcast. The finished podcast was a neatly edited version of a much longer conversation. Here follows the full discussion. You’ve put out quite an impressive a body of work for your age, young man! Two large novels -- The Green Age of Asher Witherow and now Lost Son. Thanks (chuckles). Both of your novels have been written from ...
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• Reading Cormac McCarthy

  March 14, 2008

  • As a novelist, Cormac McCarthy is many things: heir to the Southern gothic tradition, reviver of Celtic lyricism, metaphysical speculator, master comic, eschewer of punctuation, and reinventor of the iconic American West, to name a few.He has been writing and publishing novels since 1965, but most readers have plunged only recently into McCarthy’s darkly baroque work. His latest book, The Road ...
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• Art Awakens Us: The Diving Bell & the Butterfly

  March 7, 2008

  • “Being, in excess, wells up in my heart.”–Rainer Maria Rilke The most powerful works of art connect us to ourselves and each other. They awaken us, un-distract us, and bring us home to the substance of life: a touch, a taste, a color. They affirm human existence in its romance and tragedy alike. Our time here is brief, they remind us; we are duty bound to savor the wonders around us while ...
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• Rainer Maria Rilke: Myths, Masks, & the Literature of a Life

  February 21, 2008

  • Louis Menand's discussion of "the biography business" in his August 6, 2007 New Yorker article, "Lives of Others," contains several observations that interest me greatly in light of my own biographical adventures researching and composing my novel about Rainer Maria Rilke, Lost Son.Menand emphasizes that the task of biographical objectivity is a fundamentally impossible one, ...
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