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February 19, 2018

From The TLS (Steven Pinker on “What is your favourite book published in the past twelve months?”):
Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s The Internationalists. The authors take up a question close to my heart – why has interstate war declined precipitously since 1945 – and, perhaps not surprisingly for a pair of legal scholars, suggest that it is because war is literally illegal. Through most of history, this was not true – might made right, war was the continuation of policy by other means, and to the victor went the spoils. They date the change to – don’t laugh – the Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war in 1928. Though it was not respected right away (to put it mildly), the pact was the basis for the UN’s similar prohibition in 1945, which had more teeth. This is a big-think book; like The Clash of Civilizations and The End of History, The Internationalists tries to make sense of the world of today in the context of centuries of history. And Hathaway and Shapiro tell their story with literary flair.

From The TLS (Steven Pinker on “Do you have any writing tics?”):
During the years in which I plan a book I am a packrat, amassing quotations, cartoons, cultural allusions, datasets and hundreds of articles and books. Once I begin to write I become a monomaniac, working day and night to complete a first draft, followed by cycles of revisions – ideally, six drafts before it goes to my copy-editor.

From The Guardian (Joyce Carol Oates on “The book that changed my life”):
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass certainly had a profound effect on both my life and my writing.

From The Guardian (Joyce Carol Oates on “The book that had the greatest influence on my writing”):
Possibly the stories of Franz Kafka. Or Dubliners. Or Wuthering Heights. Or ...

From The Guardian (Joyce Carol Oates on “The book I’d most like to be remembered for”):
Like most writers I would be grateful to be remembered for something … It would certainly depend upon individual readers. My 2000 novel Blonde, perhaps. It was the novel that caused me the greatest heartache and left me most exhausted. But failing that, perhaps my memoir The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age.
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