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no one told me about proust - by Celine Nguyen
As the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh once said to Bookforum , “A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness.”
Celine Nguyen • no one told me about proust - by Celine Nguyen
Most elites believed that “art” described a rarified sphere...which stood in opposition to the "mass culture" of bland, sensationalist, lowest-common-denominator works made for profit. There was no confusing the two worlds, because there was a very high bar for what qualified as “art.” The avant-garde concept of art was something like “creative... See more
Celine Nguyen • no one told me about proust - by Celine Nguyen
This is how love works—you may begin for pure reasons, or egocentric and performative reasons, but in the end it has to be earnest. Our lives are short. We should read what we love and spend time with those we love. And if the world is full of writers who can model a kind of “reverse poptimism,” an unfeigned enthusiasm for the greatest works—then,... See more
Celine Nguyen • no one told me about proust - by Celine Nguyen
All I knew was that Lydia Davis—the queen of the very short story, the grand dame of American flash fiction—had once said:
You can write three thousand pages (as Proust did in In Search of Lost Time ) and still be economical.