WRITERS AT WORK.(Novel, exhibition of writers at work in specially-designed environments at the Flux Factory)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 23-MAY-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

A room of one's own, in which to write: it's an old and chronically romanticized idea--the solitary space, with an ashtray, an Olivetti, the morning light just so. Each writer has his own preferences and fetishes, of course. For Proust, it was walls insulated with cork, to keep sound out. For Bellow, a tilted drafting table, so that he could write standing up. Cheever looked out a window facing the woods; Hawthorne turned his back on one. Joseph Heller worked atop a shag carpet. The ideal persists, in a wireless age. Amy Tan surrounds herself with furniture from Imperial China.

In Queens, recently, an artists' collective called Flux Factory commissioned architects...

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