Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Tuesday, August 21

1. "It’s not too much of a stretch to say that I live in Portland because Powell’s Books is here." (James Tata at Maud Newton)

2. Libraries at the beach. (Via Dizzyhead Thomas)

3. Meaty profile on Jonathan Coe, who has a new novel coming out: In terms of wider literary inspirations...The Rain Before It Falls owes a considerable amount to two rather surprising writers. One is BS Johnson, a modernist novelist of the 1960s and 1970s, who was the subject of Coe’s biography Like a Fiery Elephant, and whose tortured credo that “telling stories is telling lies” haunted Coe during the writing of the new book (he admits, in fact, that his novels have been getting darker ever since the Johnson biography). The other, happier influence is Rosamond Lehmann, whom Coe first read in his mid-twenties, and whom he considers one of the 20th century’s key writers. —Times Online
(Via Dizzyhead Gautam)

4. Jenny D on writing:

I draft the whole thing (we’re talking about novels here) from start to finish, writing in longhand in little notebooks. Then I type up the draft, including a first edit. Then I edit the hard copy, type in revisions, repeat ad nauseam. This latest novel probably underwent at least 10 revision cycles, each one of which potentially involved two or three or four close copy-edits. At some point (usually more than once), I read the whole thing out loud to myself, to make sure the sentences sound right and that I can stand by them.