Website of Author Keith Maillard

In the Defense of My Novel

The things that alert you to another book you’re about to write are not necessarily the things that end up in that book. Why 1964? That’s when I heard Miles Davis for the first time—on someone else’s stereo. Playing Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Gallows) opened a sneaky door at the back of my … Read more

ON THE DEATH OF DORIS LESSING

Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook“Literature is analysis after the event.” Doris Lessing from The Golden Notebook.

To say that Doris Lessing had a huge impact on me is a monumental understatement.

I first read Lessing in 1970.

For two years I had been pouring all of my energy into the American antiwar movement, but now  the New Left was exploding into fiery fragments — bombs going off on campuses,  the Weatherman faction of SDS at the height of its insanity,  paranoia, bone-grinding fear, bleak nihilism. During those two years of activism I had not read fiction. I remembered the writers I used to love, felt a nostalgia for a lost time when an innocent sweetness had been possible, but in 1970 it was not possible to admire John Updike for his elegant prose. Then I read The Golden Notebook and suddenly there was Lessing in all of her fury and intensity — WAKE UP, this is serious, this is BLOODY serious, this MEANS SOMETHING.

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