D. A. Hosek

Category: writing

  • Beautiful Sentences

    I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.

  • Beautiful Sentences

    We all—in the end—die in medias res. Mona Simpson, “A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs” (The New York Times 30 October 2011)

  • Beautiful Sentences

    I don’t know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.

  • Tiered rejection from Granta

    I don’t intend, as a rule, to write much about rejections. For that I’ve got Rejection Wiki, but I just got a tiered rejection from Granta in my e-mail. Considering that I’d put Granta in the top-three markets worldwide for fiction (alongside The New Yorker and The Paris Review), this was pretty exciting for me. The piece that…

  • New York Public School’s banned words list

    There’s a list getting some play of the 50 words/topics banned from standardized tests. It seems like it’s also a good check list to make sure that a piece of writing has some relevance to contemporary readers. In The Archbishop’s Son, I manage to get 16/44. The current novel I’m working on scores 13/44 (despite…

  • Beautiful Sentences

    He wondered now if everyone had a private life. He wondered if his wife had one. It was possible all these years that he had been alone, never knowing that a complete world existed and no one spoke of it. Ann Patchett, Bel Canto.

  • Beautiful Sentences

    “What’s your baby’s name?” She told him what Ezra called the baby. Elisabeth Fairchild, “A Heavy Breath” (The Missouri Review Summer 2011)

  • Beautiful Sentences

    A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death. Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

  • Beautiful Sentences

    The only way to know tenderness is to dismantle it. Dianne Seuss, “White violet, not so much an image.” (The Missouri Review, Summer 2011).