Hi Neal,

Thanks for the recent posts on your blog and the great Grammy piece in
Salon.

Someone needs to do a long essay questioning where American literature
is going and I think that you are the one to do it.

Tom Wolfe in 1989 in Harper's published something called "In Search of
the Billion-Footed Beast" (that might not be an accurate title) that
suggested that young writers need to move away from what they learned at the Iowa writers' workshop or at Stanford and return to a naturalism, using Zola as a model.

You raised a good question a few days ago: Where is American lit going, post 9/11? You are right in that Irony and McSweeney's are not the only answers.

I haven't looked a the Wolfe essay in a long time and I don't think that it is available on the web unless Harper's has it, but you are the one to write an update to it. We deserve more than Alexander Payne showing us Bill Murray mugging for the camera or Dave Eggers.

Please think about it.

Thanks,

Les

Posted by at 10:56 PM | Permalink