Ten Favorite Novels About Real Writers
(alphabetically by writer—not the one who wrote it, but the one it’s about)
Charles Baudelaire*: Crossings by Alex Landragin
Italo Calvino**: The Neighborhood by Gonçalo M. Tavares
Lewis Carroll: Still She Haunts Me by Katie Roiphe
Emily Dickinson: The Lady in White by Christian Bobin
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg
Gustave Flaubert: Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
Carlos Fuentes: The Literary Conference by César Aira
Federico García Lorca: The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell by Carlos Rojas
Désiré Nisard: Demolishing Nisard by Éric Chevillard
Pliny the Elder: Awake: Sublunar Visions and Temptations by Harald Voetmann
* and Walter Benjamin
** and Roberto Juarroz, Karl Kraus, Henri Michaux, Paul Valéry, and Robert Walser
— June 27, 2024