Ben Schrank picks music to accompany his new novel, Love is a Canoe.

Most novels don’t rely so heavily on the phrases ‘the meeting has been rescheduled’ and ‘best wishes’, though.

In that moment there is no one as lonely, lovelorn, and unlovable as you; and yet this feeling of hopelessness mixes, oddly, with a perverse kind of hope, of resistance to the regrettable physical facts, and you’re filled with the desire to write something, to go back to your room and be like Flaubert, solitary and misanthropic and a God-damned genius. Jeffrey Eugenides' advice for young writers.