A hundred years without Mark Twain
Mark Twain, who died a hundred years ago today, entered the world and left with Halley’s Comet. His essays have a permanent place on my bedside table; I read them whenever my own writing stalls. Those perfect verbs, those unexpected but accurate nouns, that distinctive sense of the absurd and limitless ability to [...]
Wit, precision, uppers, and God: the Muriel Spark bio
My review of Martin Stannard’s Muriel Spark biography appears at Barnes & Noble Review (and is reprinted at Salon). One of the things that struck me while reading is just how easily Spark — one of the finest and funniest novelists of the last century, or of any century — could have continued to [...]
Day in the Life: Hynes’ reading list for Next
My friend James Hynes’ Next is a departure from his prior novels in many ways, not least in that the action is set in a single day. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Tod Goldberg says the book, is “wildly inventive, stunning… an essential piece of American literature that is both of its time [...]
Pick up new Thomson excerpt at tonight’s Granta party
The current issue of Granta includes contributions from Kenzaburo Oe, Mary Gaitskill, Javier Marías, Will Self, Mahmoud Darwish, Lionel Shriver, William T. Vollmann, and more, and I’m looking forward to reading them, but when the package arrived yesterday I (of course) turned immediately to the (excellent) excerpt from Rupert Thomson’s [...]
Pulling Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain off the shelf
My father-in-law — a warm, funny, and brilliant man of idiosyncratic passions, the only person I know who’s read Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? and enjoys it as much as I do — was diagnosed with multiple myeloma last fall.
It’s a terrible disease (and rare, except for those who, [...]
Draft that became Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain
The handwritten divisions on James Baldwin’s synposis of Crying Holy, the draft novel that evolved into Go Tell It on the Mountain, offer a look at his early thoughts about structure.
The page pictured above is the first of four; you can find the rest — and much, much more [...]
A queer idea of me: Poe regrets drunkenness
In 1842, Edgar Allan Poe got so drunk on mint juleps while visiting New York that he sent a letter apologizing to publishers J. and H.G. Langley.
Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behavior while in N-York? You must have conceived a queer [...]
On Marlon James and The Book of Night Women
Last year I met the very talented Marlon James by accident at a PEN event. Afterward, he joined my friends Mark Sarvas and Amitava Kumar, and me, for a marvelous dinner at which I ate too little while drinking brown liquor. James and I talked about William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Jean Rhys, and I [...]
Brock Clarke on Muriel Spark’s genuine artifice
When Muriel Spark died a few years ago, writer Katharine Weber implored me to go beyond the works I’d already read and admired — The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Finishing School — to Spark’s “utterly sublime first novel, The Comforters, written to save herself from madness. You can learn how to write [...]
Tributes to Ellen Miller trickle in
Given the intensity and depth of her fiction, and the fact that it was once so popular, I’m surprised that so little has been written about the loss of Like Being Killed author Ellen Miller. Would her death have received more attention if she’d been younger — she was in her forties — a [...]
R.I.P. Ellen Miller (and a public memorial service)
I’m only now learning that Ellen Miller, author of the amazing ’90s junkie novel Like Being Killed, died of a heart attack on December 23 at the age of forty-one.
When Ken Foster announced the terrible news a couple weeks ago, he quoted the book’s opening:
We crowded around the rickety kitchen table, predicting how each [...]
Bolaño’s “The Beach” translated at Eyeshot in December
The Times‘ Larry Rohter reports on the controversy that has erupted over the details of Roberto Bolaño’s life story.
Bolaño himself fostered the idea, enthusiastically embraced by U.S. critics and readers, that he had a heroin habit. But his widow and agent dispute this detail, as do Latin American critics. Julio Ortega, a [...]
James Baldwin improvises like a writer, at You Tube
Several months ago the L.A. Times’ Carolyn Kellogg pointed out how amazing it is that long-dead authors can “continue to exist, in shadowy form, on You Tube.”
Today I uncovered several videos of the great James Baldwin. The one above is my favorite. It makes me wish he could have lived to see [...]
How would you expect Arthur Conan Doyle to sound?
Last week my old friend Rick and I read the first four sentences of some of our favorite novels over the phone and made the other person grade them blind.
Although the scores were in before the source of each excerpt was revealed, inevitably a few books were recognizable [...]
Iris Murdoch speaks, clutches forehead at YouTube
“Literature does many, many things, and philosophy does one thing.”
Jacket Copy’s Carolyn Kellogg has unearthed an assortment of videos featuring authors who are no longer with us, but “continue to exist, in shadowy form, on YouTube.”
Joy of joys, this interview with Iris Murdoch is among them. (Parts 2, 3, 4, & [...]