Franklin puts the more personal criticism made of writers down to envy, blaming bloggers, and thinks British literary culture is uniquely mean.
Earlier this month, Salon.com critiqued the book, asking, "Will it be as bad as its cover?" "Bob Woodward, the famous flatterer of Washington's career elite and writer-down of whatever they tell him, has finished his first Obama book.
Among its findings: Only 4 of the 25 colleges require a survey course of major English writers, down from 13 in 1964; likewise, only 4 still have a Shakespeare requirement, down from 12 in 1964.
It's that time of the week for CrunchWeek, in which a few of us TechCrunch writers plop down in front of a massive white table to talk about the news du jour from the past week.
A sunset, a want ad, a boy with a face full of secrets, anything can lead a writer down the path of "What if?" For Far From You, it was three sentences, scribbled in a notebook and the image of a boy and a girl, full of grief, and kissing for all the wrong reasons: Later, I stare at his face in the moonlight and wonder if he can tell that I kissed him like I already know the shape of his lips.
In 1927, the Louisiana man of letters Lyle Saxon complained to Sherwood Anderson that none of the writers rushing down to chronicle the effects of the great Mississippi River flood seemed able to make things "wet enough or muddy enough".
Dawn Churchill Belper Sharon Olds's collection of poems Stag's Leap (Jonathan Cape) is a heartbreaking account of the break-up (or down) of the writer's marriage.
It puts some writers down for months.
It puts some writers down for life.
The issue of predetermined fate and the 'gods' of Baltimore frequently crop up in discussion of the show, but what if the writers fell down on the side of chaos theory rather than causality?
Hunger is the result of a writer stripping down, exposing everything, delivering a pound of flesh in pages.
