Catching up on recent unread editions of the Washington Post Book World<\/i>, I came across an interview with Tobias Wolff which accompanied the review of his new collection, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories<\/i>. As is sometimes the case, I found the questions to be as interesting as the answers. <\/p>\n
Interviewer Daniel Asa Rose asked Wolff the following in the April 13 issue:<\/p>\n
I’ll bet you’re sick of the term “dirty realism”—first applied to you and fellow writers Raymond Carver, Richard Ford et. al., by Bill Buford in <\/i>Granta in 1983.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
When Wolff replies that he doesn’t know what that term means, the interviewer explains:<\/p>\n
To me it means martini drinkers writing about beer drinkers: the fascination certain middle-class authors have for working-class characters.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I was glad to see that Wolff had never heard of the term, since I<\/i> had never heard of the term. I understood the school of writing practiced by Carver, Jayne Anne Philips, and others to simply be referred to as “minimalism.”<\/p>\n
Need I be embarrassed by this hole in my knowledge? Raise your hand if you’re also unaware of this literary distinction.<\/p>\n
Or am I the only one?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Catching up on recent unread editions of the Washington Post Book World, I came across an interview with Tobias Wolff which accompanied the review of his new collection, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. As is sometimes the case, I found the questions to be as interesting as the answers. Interviewer Daniel Asa Rose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12825"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12826,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12825\/revisions\/12826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}