John Freeman remembers his affection, as a new college graduate living far from his girlfriend, for James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. “I fell into the novel as if it were a manhole someone hadn’t covered over,” Freeman says. So deep was his identification that, when he reads commentary on the book now, he worries “that I somehow straighted a gay novel . . .
Nobel laureate José Saramago discusses his politics with Stephanie Merritt. [T]he image of the venerable novelist shut away in his island retreat, disengaged from the world, could not be further from the truth. Saramago is about to leave Lanzarote for two months of travelling, as he does most years, in part to promote the new novel, but mainly to speak . . .
The newly revised Portable Dorothy Parker includes about 600 pages of Parker’s essays, poetry, reviews, stories, and letters. Editor Marion Meade also reproduces the 1956 Paris Review interview in which Parker dismisses all her poetry in a single answer. (“My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody else, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in . . .