#william giraldi

[thequietabsolute]

Susan Sontag says, ‘One should write posthumously.’ … we must get over the fear of being disliked by a weakling multitude; our only concern should be earning the respect of those who have earned theirs.

— William Giraldi

[poetsandwriters]

Frank Bidart in “Sufficient Density,” an interview with William Giraldi featured in the May/June 2013 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

[80smuscle]

80s muscle kid William Giraldi

[lakanen]

Marium: I’m not convinced the answers exist.

Core: They do. Whether or not they fit in our experience is another matter.

[nyrbclassics]

You be the judge—Norman Podhoretz’s first memoir, Making It, is back, with a new introduction by Terry Teachout.

Read more:

Jeet Heer in The New Republic William Giraldi in The Baffler John Leland’s recent profile of the author in The New York Times

[thequietabsolute]

‘I also think that one should wish to be the bête noire of the majority, i mean i don’t mind being detested by roving mobs of the mediocre, or those bored assassins of social media who seem perfectly content to defend as much dross as possible. I think that if a critic’s views meet with disapproval by these people then they will be met with praise by posterity. Susan Sontag says, ‘One should write posthumously.’ … we must get over the fear of being liked by a weakling multitude; our only concern should be earning the respect of those who have earned theirs.

— William Giraldi. (source)

[poetsandwriters]

“If we writers have entered into literature hoping for riches and fame, then we probably deserve to be disappointed on that score. There are riches and fame to be had in tech and TV, I hear. Literature, however, both the reading and the writing of it, finds those aspirations obscene precisely because they run counter to how literature works: by the facilitating of our silent realms, those inner reservoirs of stillness....”

—William Giraldi, in “Author Envy: The Art of Surviving One’s Own Personality” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (2019)

[poetsandwriters]

Literature isn’t meant to confirm identity but rather to challenge and upset it....We go to Jesus’ Son precisely because in its most sublime moments it reveals to us a condition both lesser and greater than human. We go to it for the flawlessness of its aesthetic form, its transformative spiritual seeing, and the beauty, the deathless beauty, of sentences that sing of possible bliss.

William Giraldi on Denis Johnson (Poets & Writers, 2013)