D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • “An Outsider”: The Story Behind the Story

    This is another story which has been kicking around for a while before it finally was published, Back in the ‘90s, I submitted this to Story, received a hand-written rejection letter and didn’t realize that was a sign I was onto something and didn’t do anything more with the piece for years. This story has…

  • Beautiful Sentences: James Wood

    The acceptance of this kind of writing is dangerous not because anybody will confuse it with life, will think, “This is what life is like,” but because readers may read it and think, “This is what literature is like.” James Wood, “Tom Wolfe’s Shallowness, and the Trouble with Information.”

  • Beautiful Sentences: John Fowles

    If you want to be true to life, start lying about the reality of it. John Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel.”

  • Beautiful Sentences: John Updike

    Real life now commences, they are informed; the Eden of public education has shut its garden gate. A garden, Levy reflects, of rote teaching dully ignored, of the vicious and ignorant dominating the timid and dutiful, but a garden nevertheless, a weedy patch of hopes, a rough and ill-tilled seedbed of what this nation wants…

  • The Big Countdown

    My number went back up to 87 from 83, which is still less than my pre-drop life expectancy, but close enough that I can consider last year’s drop to be the anomaly, although I can still do more to improve my health and perhaps get a little bit more time with my family. In the…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Harry Levin

    The history of the realistic novel shows that fiction tends towards autobiography. The increasing demands for social and psychological detail that are made upon the novelist can only be satisfied out of his own experience. The forces which make him an outsider focus his observation upon himself. Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction.

  • Beautiful Sentences: John Updike

    Real life now commences, they are informed; the Eden of public education has shut its garden gate. A garden, Levy reflects, of rote teaching dully ignored, of the vicious and ignorant dominating the timid and dutiful, but a garden nevertheless, a weedy patch of hopes, a rough and ill-tilled seedbed of what this nation wants…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Dorothy M. Richardson

    People thought it was silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt a book, there was something wrong about the book. If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading it at all? Dorothy M. Richardson, Honeycomb.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Kelly Link

    Now that we are married, we will have the same dreams. Kelly Link, “Shoe and Marriage.”