If You Want to Publish, Here's What to Read

Contemporary writers have to write for contemporary readers

My current favorite unrealistic portrayal of the writing life: The Durrells in Corfu, set in the the 1930s, in which Adorable Novelist Lawrence Durrell types, smokes, drinks, seduces women, and occasionally tosses a manuscript in the post.

You know those movies about writers in Days of Yore, in which said writers gleefully slam THE END into their typewr…