Persons attempting to find a "text" in this [story] will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR - Wendell Berry's introduction to Jayber Crow.
This article was posted to Jayber on 18 February 2008 by to the following categories: Residuals.
An audio version of this article is also available.
Nick Fraser on the American novelist, Richard Yates, quoting a character from Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, on the topic of Revolutionary Road:
I wouldn't recommend finishing it on Christmas Day, in a cold-water bedsit, [...] It probably didn't help my general sense of well-being, if you know what I mean, because the ending is a real downer.
Ellen Barkin, producer of an upcoming film based on Easter Parade:
Brits immediately get Yates - maybe because they have never bought into anything as dumb as the American dream. There's no "glad morning" in his books.