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because so much reading, writing, and living happens after-hours

Late Last
Night Books
because so much reading, writing, and living happens after-hours
Since 2013
Gary Garth McCann, founder and managing editor
an ad-free magazine about fiction by authors Terra Ziporyn * Sally Whitney * Eileen Haavik McIntire * Gary Garth McCann * Peter G. Pollak * Garry Craig Powell * Jenny Yacovissi * Lily Iona MacKenzie * Todd S. Garth * Daniel Oliver
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Author Archives: Garry Craig Powell

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Why Fiction Writers Should Read Shakespeare

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 JANUARY 2021 Why Fiction Writers Should Read Shakespeare
The Droeshout portrait, 1623. Martin Droeshout never saw the subject, but this is supposed to be the best image of the man.

It struck me recently that I still hadn’t read all of Shakespeare, and there was no real excuse. After all, I claim to be a writer, in English, and Shakespeare has been regarded as the prince of poets for four hundred years. It’s possible that in our benighted days, when even university curricula frequently try to teach identity politics—which means bombarding their students with woke authors of cool ethnicities and sexual persuasions, among other things—Shakespeare, as a Dead White Male from an evil colonial country, is considered irrelevant, or worse, pernicious. But quite apart from the fact that the man was surely gay or bisexual (it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s read the sonnets coming to any other conclusion) and that his plays are full of gender-fluid people, there are compelling literary reasons to read him too.

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Why Fiction Writers Should Read (and maybe Write) Poetry

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 NOVEMBER 2020 Why Fiction Writers Should Read (and maybe Write) Poetry

Most fiction writers don’t read much poetry, let’s be honest. I confess I don’t read much contemporary American poetry myself. So much of it is either incomprehensible–even to someone who has a higher degree in Creative Writing–or pretentious, or simply tedious in its insistence on the usual woke themes. However, this past few weeks I’ve been reading the Oxford Library of English Poetry, a three-volume anthology edited by John Wain, and have found it not only immensely pleasurable, but also, I believe, useful.

Let’s take the pleasure part first. This anthology contains no American verse, and as Wain himself admits, there have been many great American poets. If you were to make an anthology of the best verse in English, a number of them would have to be included: Whitman and Emily Dickinson are two obvious giants.

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Martin Amis vs. Bernardine Evaristo

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 OCTOBER 2020 Martin Amis vs. Bernardine Evaristo
Photo by Javier Arce (cropped). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Feud! This week one of my favourite authors, Martin Amis, said in an interview (in the Evening Standard, 21 October 2020) that he had not read the latest Booker Prize winners because ‘You don’t feel a literary push behind it. It’s politics, it’s sociopolitical considerations rather than literary like the Nobel.’ He also said that ‘To read your contemporaries, let alone your juniors, is an uneconomical way of dividing your reading time.’ So how did Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker winner, react to this?

Just two days later, in the same British newspaper, Evaristo lashed out: ‘Amis seems to belong to the school of privileged male writers of a certain generation who have benefited from a white, patriarchal society for decades.’

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Quiz: Are You Destined for Literary Success?

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 SEPTEMBER 2020 Quiz: Are You Destined for Literary Success?

Are You Destined for Literary Success?

Just fill in our quiz, all you talented wordsmiths, and find out!

  1. How talented are you? Be brutally honest, babes! a. Off the charts – right up there with Dan Brown and Lee Childs b. No genius, but I know my craft, and work my ass off c. Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie would like my work if they knew it d. I don’t know crap about grammar or spelling, but hey, that’s what editors are for, right?
  2. How much training do you have in Creative Writing? a. Bachelor’s degree b. MFA c. PhD d. I went to a summer workshop and slept with one of the tutors
  3. Your social media presence a. rivals Kim Kardashian’s b.
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Tom Jones – DWM Garbage or Masterpiece?

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 AUGUST 2020 Tom Jones – DWM Garbage or Masterpiece?

I recently finished reading Fielding’s chef d’oeuvre, Tom Jones, first published in 1749, and running to over 750 pages in the Norton Critical Edition—without the critical essays at the end. So by contemporary standards it’s a whopper, and that in itself may be why sufficient reason why so few people, apart from English Lit. students, have read it. (And have they? I suspect half of them merely skim it.) And yet, with some reservations, I very much enjoyed reading it, and benefited from the experience quite a bit. In this thumbnail review, I shall consider some of the reasons why people may shy away from it, and try to show what they’re missing.

First, it was written nearly three hundred years ago, so some will be wary of the ‘old English.’

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A Catalogue of Worthless Writers

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 JULY 2020 A Catalogue of Worthless Writers

Let’s face it: plenty of writers are rubbish. I’m afraid I despise, deplore, or simply detest quite a lot of them. They include:

Writers with no sense of humour;

Writers who think they mustn’t offend anyone;

Writers who believe the purpose of fiction is to edify their readers;

Smug, self-righteous, or sententious writers;

‘Woke’ writers;

Writers with an overt or covert political agenda (especially the latter);

Pretentious writers;

Writers who are toadies, lickspittles and arse-kissers;

Writers who admire (or pretend to admire) other writers because they are successful;

Writers who believe that an MFA or PhD in Creative Writing qualifies them to write;

Writers who believe that a writer’s colour, religion, sexual orientation, sex (or gender!) qualifies anyone to write;

Writers who whine about their white privilege;

Writers who don’t bother to learn the rules of English usage or spelling;

Writers who don’t think it’s important to read the canon;

Writers who think the canon needs to be decolonised;

Writers who think it’s necessarily important to read the latest literary prize winners;

Writers who are ignorant of history and philosophy;

Writers who think their drug experiences are interesting;

Writers who believe that their experiences as victims is fascinating and important;

Writers who despise other writers because they are not, or were not, morally pure;

Writers who follow the latest trends and write for the market;

Writers who think that their ‘platform’ is important;

Writers who believe that writers are essentially social engineers;

Writers who are certain that their values and views are correct;

Writers who can’t think for themselves (at the current time, the majority, sad to say);

Writers who watch more TV or movies than read books;

Writers who want the writer’s ‘lifestyle’;

Writers who think their job is always to be kind;

Writers with no imagination (a surprisingly large proportion);

Writers with no ear for language (incredibly, the majority, whether ‘literary’ or otherwise);

Writers who think literary agents know more about literature than they do;

Writers who believe that the world needs their novel;

To sum up: Writers who are not artists, but hacks or halfwits.

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Why Can’t Writers Write Right Now?

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 JUNE 2020 Why Can’t Writers Write Right Now?

(Yes, the rhyme is deliberate.) Well: is it Covid-19? Maybe it was, a bit. At first. People’s routines were upset, they felt anxious, under-stimulated, and possibly other things seemed more important. But what kind of excuses are those? Crap ones. More serious, possibly, is the furore over George Floyd’s death and racism in recent weeks. Not only has there been unrest in the US and the UK, which at times has seemed to threaten the very fabric of society, but also, black writers have been demanding a more prominent role. (I say black writers rather than ‘diverse writers’ because by far the most vocal writers have been black, and most of them seem to have been pointing specifically to under-representation by African-Americans (in the US) or Afro-British (in the UK).

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How Jane Austen Learned to Write

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 MAY 2020 How Jane Austen Learned to Write

She didn’t do an MFA in Creative Writing, let alone a PhD. She didn’t even have a BA in it. Or in English. And yet Jane wrote the initial draft of Sense and Sensibility when she was 18, and had finished Pride and Prejudice by the time she was 20. Astonishing? Yes. So how did she do it? Did she follow the advice of the self-appointed writing gurus—who tell you that if you can’t do a degree in the subject, you need to attend expensive conferences, join writing groups, get professional editors? No, none of that. So how on earth did she learn her craft?

By reading and writing. I’m not an Austen scholar, but I know that in the late eighteenth century England’s public libraries had not yet been founded, so it’s fair to assume that most of her reading was done in her father’s library.

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The Martin Amis-Garry Craig Powell Reading List for Covid-19 Quarantine

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 APRIL 2020 The Martin Amis-Garry Craig Powell Reading List for Covid-19 Quarantine

A proliferation of reading lists has appeared since quarantine began: ‘comfort reading’ (Susan Hill), lists about pandemics, lists of new novels (nearly all by women) and so on. But isn’t this a good time to catch up on our serious reading? I recently mentioned to a friend, novelist David Joiner, that in The Pregnant Widow, the protagonist Keith Nearing manages to read practically the whole canon of the British novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in fact up to about 1920) during a single long vacation, while he stays at a castle in Italy with a bevy of nubile young women, one of them named Scheherazade. DH and Frieda Lawrence were once guests at the same castle, which happens to have an excellent English library.

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Write for Your Life! How Coranavirus Could Improve Your Writing and Life

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 MARCH 2020 Write for Your Life! How Coranavirus Could Improve Your Writing and Life

And I don’t just mean because you probably have more free time now, although there is that, of course. I can think of a number of other advantages of the enforced retreat we’re all taking, some practical, some emotional, and some (dare I say it?) spiritual.

First, you’re probably less distracted. News on all topics apart from the virus is drying up. No more endless debates about issues which enrage you! No need to respond to countless messages in your social media feeds. And it’s much quieter. Last night I stepped out of my house and couldn’t hear a single car. I live in a rural area of Portugal, but even so, the silence was otherworldly. I called my wife outside and the whole countryside seemed still and peaceful.

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The Unspoken Prejudice Against Male Authors

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 FEBRUARY 2020 The Unspoken Prejudice Against Male Authors

A headline in today’s Guardian gushes: ‘Rathbone Folio Prize: Zadie Smith makes female-dominated shortlist.’ Now I like Zadie, and although I haven’t read her first story collection, Grand Union, I doubt that it’s unworthy. Still, I must admit (dare I?) that on reading “female-dominated shortlist” I did think, ‘Another one?’ And in case you wonder, as I did myself for a moment, if it were merely my impression that women writers have been dominating the prize shortlists lately, I did some research. These are the facts about a few major recent prizes:

Rathbone Folio Prize, 2020: 6/8 shortlisted writers are women

Booker Prize, 2019: 5/6 finalists were women

National Book Award Finalists, 2019: 4/5 finalists were women

National Book Critics Circle First Book Award, 2019: 6/7 finalists were women

Orange Prize for Fiction, 2019: 6/6 finalists were women.

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‘Woke’ Fiction Writing–is it Responsible for the Decline of the Serious Novel?

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 JANUARY 2020 ‘Woke’ Fiction Writing–is it Responsible for the Decline of the Serious Novel?

Are you getting bored by so-called literary fiction these days? Perhaps finding it didactic, lecturing and hectoring—and terribly predictable? One of the results of the ‘liberal consensus’ which almost everyone I know shares, is that there is a great tribe of people who not only have the same views on nearly every issue, but also that this tribe, composed largely of academics and the intelligentsia, expects its writers to trumpet those views, and punishes writers who fail to do so. Writers have always been concerned with social issues like poverty, prejudice against women, certain social classes, and ethnic and other minorities; the difference is that nowadays, instead of investigating them, dispassionately, and allowing the reader to make up his or her mind, many writers are simply preaching: using fictional forms to promote an ideology.

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Is Your Writing Too Good?

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 NOVEMBER 2019 Is Your Writing Too Good?

In the past week, one of my friends posted on Facebook that she had been recently rejected by The New Yorker. Cue for most of her friends to reassure her that eventually the magazine would take her work. Well-meaning, of course, but I noticed two subtexts in most of them: one, the majority, was that those idiot editors just didn’t recognise talent when they saw it, but surely would in the end (though what grounds they had for such optimism, I don’t know). The other one was that she just had to persist with her writing—in effect, that her writing wasn’t quite good enough yet, and all she had to do was be patient and perfect her craft.

            It’s possible that either view is correct, or both.

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Was the Swedish Academy wrong to honour Handke?

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 OCTOBER 2019 Was the Swedish Academy wrong to honour Handke?

Peter Handke was one of the two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, and by now everyone knows, as the Swedish Academy did, that he supported Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader accused of genocide. My intention here is not to discuss whether Handke is a man who approves of genocide or not, but to question the basis on which literary prizes are awarded. Are they given for literary merit, or for the personal merit of the author? Or to put it another way: are prizes given for the value of the work of art, or for the character of the artist? This question is important not only for literature but more broadly for our entire civilisation.

My own political position should be irrelevant, but in case anyone doubts, let me begin by affirming that I condemn the genocide in Bosnia by the Bosnian Serbian forces, and have no sympathy whatever with Milosevic.

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Graham Greene – A Masterclass in Fiction

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 SEPTEMBER 2019 Graham Greene – A Masterclass in Fiction

‘The most accomplished living novelist in the English language,’ John Irving said of Greene before the latter’s death in 1991—and yet how many Creative Writing students, especially in North America, have even heard of him these days, let alone read him? When I taught at a US graduate program, and recommended him, I generally found that my students did not know his work, even if they had heard of him. Of course, they had been stuffed full of novels by more ‘diverse’ writers.

So I shall stick my neck out and proclaim: You can save yourself thousands of dollars, writing students. Read half a dozen of Greene’s best novels carefully, as a writer does, and it will yield you more benefit than most MFA programs, especially those of the fashionable throw-the-western-canon-out-of-window variety.

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Least Favourite Current Fiction Writers

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 AUGUST 2019 Least Favourite Current Fiction Writers

‘I would dread a world where to publish I had first to be certified as a nice person,’ wrote Lionel Shriver in The Spectator (16 December, 2017), and I agree. So, in the interests of countering what I consider to be the noxious and nauseating habit of being nice all the time—how the kindergarten teachers who police our arts love to lecture us on that—I have decided to publish a list of my least favourite writers. No gushing over how wonderful these fictioneers are, or what exemplary human beings they may be. No. These are people whose writing is over-rated, in my view (‘but that’s just me,’ as the current phrase goes, as if we should apologise for having an opinion at all, which we do if we are to remain PC-approved), or whose personalities I find abhorrent, usually because they’re sanctimonious or affected or hypocritical–but I feel I’m entitled to a little prejudice.

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Writers’ Conferences – Are they Worthwhile? Part One

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 MAY 2019 Writers’ Conferences – Are they Worthwhile? Part One

Let’s start with the Associated Writing Programs Conference, since that’s the one most US writers are familiar with. It’s the biggest, the glitziest, with superstars like Margaret Atwood and Karen Russell giving keynotes, and–so one is told–it’s a great place to ‘network’, which actually means, as far as I can gather, to behave like a salesperson, using sycophancy, your natural oodles of charm (it’s well known that fiction writers are captivating extroverts, isn’t it?) to sell–well, yourself. Hmm… isn’t that a teeny bit like, well (am I still allowed to pronounce this word?) prostitution? Not that there’s anything wrong with prostitution, of course! But in fact, for most writers, AWP is an utter waste of money (especially) and time. It is, to use a British expression, rubbish.

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A Conversation with Roz Morris, Pt. 4: Not Just a Teacher – Making Time for Your Own Writing

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 APRIL 2019 A Conversation with Roz Morris, Pt. 4: Not Just a Teacher – Making Time for Your Own Writing

P

Roz Morris: We’re both writers. We’ve both taught and mentored authors as well. I find it’s a double-edged sword. Getting involved in another person’s creative process can be draining because you want to do your best for them.

Garry Craig Powell: It’s incredibly hard not to be drained by it—and that’s one of the best arguments I can think of not to become a creative writing teacher.

RM: Do you find it’s a struggle to protect your own creative mojo?

GCP: It’s a constant struggle, and most teachers fail to do so. During term-time, my own creative and intellectual energies were almost entirely absorbed by my students’ work. Sometimes, especially when working with highly-motivated, talented graduate students, that was worthwhile.

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A Conversation with Roz Morris, Part 3. Are Creative Writing Degrees Relevant in the Current Publishing Climate?

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 MARCH 2019 A Conversation with Roz Morris, Part 3. Are Creative Writing Degrees Relevant in the Current Publishing Climate?

Roz Morris: The publishing business, like all arts businesses, has been through many upheavals in recent years. Has this affected creative writing courses? Do some students come to a course because they think a qualification will give them an extra foothold for a publishing deal?

Roz Morris with two of her novels

Garry Craig Powell: I don’t think it’s affected creative writing courses enough. They have a responsibility to be absolutely honest with students, who often do begin their courses thinking that the degree will give them an excellent chance of getting a publishing deal—which as you know, is far from the case. In fact no one in the publishing world cares what your academic background is, as far as I can tell.

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Thinking of Taking a Creative Writing Course? A conversation with Roz Morris, Part 2

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 FEBRUARY 2019 Thinking of Taking a Creative Writing Course? A conversation with Roz Morris, Part 2
Roz Morris is a professional writer, editor and blogger. She is the author of the Nail Your Novel series, as well as the novels My Memories of a Future Life and Life Form Three. She is also the author of Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction, (for which I interviewed Roz in this blogzine exactly one year ago, January 26th, 2018). She teaches masterclasses for The Guardian newspaper’s writing classes, and has ghost-written bestselling books.  

Part 2 – Should you take a creative writing degree? And if so, how to choose one

Roz Morris: Any general advice for writers who are wondering whether to take such a course? Who should take them? Who shouldn’t?

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