He reads Hemingway, Vladimir Nabakov, Katherine Anne Porter, and John O'Hara, assessing his own strengths as a writer against theirs.
This pitting of writer against subject becomes the overriding strategy in the last 200 pages of "Shakey".
Most cases of sexual assault against French politicians are dropped, including one by Tristane Banon, a French writer, against Mr Strauss-Kahn.
It's the kind of imponderable, unanswerable question that sets writer against writer, critic against critic, with little sign of any resolution.
Here, in weighing the rights of an anonymous writer against the rights of staff singled out by name, we believed it was reasonable to ask Twitter to supply the identity of the person making these comments," she added.
Here, in weighing the rights of an anonymous writer against the rights of staff singled out by name, we believed it was reasonable to ask Twitter to supply the identity of the person making these comments.
The big question most people have about anything – sports, business, politics – is: how is it doing?" Thinking about this, imagining measuring my performance as a writer against a machine's infinite capacity for number crunching, I wonder how much human intuition about where stories lie, about what will move or interest or excite readers, can be replicated.
Switzerland, currently at the Sydney Opera House theatre, is Joanna Murray-Smith's go at writing "a Highsmith about Highsmith", a psychological thriller that (fictitiously) pits the reclusive and rebarbative crime writer against a young publishing assistant sent to persuade her to write one final Tom Ripley novel.
Even Paul Carr, Techcrunch's slightly more coiffeured version of Malcolm Gladwell, leapt into the fray, defending the poor, persecuted New Yorker writer against the retweeting mob.
Writer against his father's wishes.
