D. A. Hosek

Category: writing

  • Beautiful sentences

    I heard my self using a snotty tone to Judge Prowse. I was put off by it. But then wondered where snottiness comes from. It comes from an attempt to be funny and companionable. And this striving stems from a sense that one is not secure of confident—it’s a lack of confidence. That one feels…

  • Beautiful Sentences

    There’s a mystery in the thought of the re-creation of an old man as an old man, with all the defects and injuries of what is called long life faithfully preserved in him, and all their claims and all their tendencies honored, too, as in the steady progress of arthritis in my left knee.  …

  • Beautiful Sentences

    I like the crust, as long as there’s something still stuck to the bread. I like the remnants of things. Michael Winter, The Big Why.

  • Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny

    While reading T. S. Eliot’s The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism, I came across an interesting observation: For the simplest auditors there is the plot, for the more thoughtful the character and conflict of character, for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more musically sensitive the rhythm, and for…

  • 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…