Excerpt from 'The Falls' by Joyce Carol Oates

"No. Please, God. Not this."

The hurt. The humiliation. The unspeakable shame. Not grief, not yet. The shock was too immediate for grief. When she discovered the enigmatic note her husband had left for her propped against a mirror in the bedroom of their honeymoon suite at the Rainbow Grand Hotel, Niagara Falls, New York, Ariah had been married twenty-one hours. When, in the early afternoon of that day, she learned from Niagara Falls police that a man resembling her husband, Gilbert Erskine, had thrown himself into the Horseshoe Falls early that morning and had been swept away — "vanished, so far without a trace" — beyond the Devil's Hole Rapids, as the scenic attraction downriver from The Falls was named, she'd been married not quite twenty-eight hours.

These were the stark, cruel facts.

"I'm a bride who has become a widow in less than a day."

John Updike on Joyce Carol Oates

"Joyce Carol Oates, born in 1938, was perhaps born a hundred years too late; she needs a lustier audience, a race of Victorian word-eaters, to be worthy of her astounding productivity." 
"She has, I fear, rather overwhelmed the puny, mean-minded critical establishment of this country. Single-mindedness and efficiency rather than haste underlie her prolificacy; if the phrase 'woman of letters' existed, she would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it."
—John Updike, Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

Maybe this moment of speechlessness helped to make Daniel Baciagalupo become a writer. All those moments when you know you should speak, but you can't think of what to say -- as a writer, you can never give enough  attention to those moments.

All writers must know how to distance themselves, to detach themselves from this and that moment ...

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Some gems of wisdom from John Irving's "Last Night In Twisted River"

New Year's Resolution Reading List: 9 Books on Reading and Writing

New, old, and dead writers offer their advice for stepping up your literary game.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/01/new-years-resolution-reading-list-9-books-on-reading-and-writing/251079/

Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I did not myself understand.

---  James Joyce, from "Araby" in "Dubliners"

Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I did not myself understand.

--- James Joyce, from "Araby" in "Dubliners"

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the
people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in
parantheses. -- John Irving, "The Cider House Rules"