Visual artists draw from visual references, not words, as they imagine their work. So when language is in the driver’s seat of making art, it erects a barrier between the artist and the canvas.
‘Literary couples are a plague,’ wrote Elsa Morante, married to Alberto Moravia. They’re one of the couples in this lively exploration of what happens when two writers share loves and lives.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author was always willing to experiment with his prose, pacing and narration, crafting an oeuvre that varied wildly in style and structure.
ChatGPT threatens to change writing as we know it. But the Mesopotamians, who lived 4,000 years ago in modern-day Iraq, went through this kind of seismic change before us, when they invented writing.
The technology’s focus on the framing of the artistic task amounts to the fetishization of the creative moment – and devalues the journey that waters the seed of an idea to its fruition.
A new survey of Australian authors finds that while author incomes have (very slightly) grown, they remain perilously low – which makes it hard to find time to write.
Books are one of the oldest forms of communication ‘technology,’ a scholar writes, and understanding how they’ve evolved over time provides insights into their role in society.