Thursday afternoon miscellany
Speaking of Alison Bechdel (last item), Ginia Bellfante accompanies the author on a tour of her childhood home, lovingly restored to Victorian splendor by her closeted teacher/undertaker/control freak father before his death 26 years ago. Bechdel’s dad was killed four months after she came out to him. He and the house are memorialized [...]
Wednesday evening miscellany
Formerly reclusive Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee will appear in an advertising campaign “extolling the advantages of becoming an Australian citizen.”
Pinky’s Paperhaus serves up three podcast installments of a talk with Aimee Bender. Somewhere in Nova Scotia, Stephany Aulenback is turning cartwheels. (Via Return of the Reluctant.)
Pinky also recalls meeting a shirtless Rupert Pole, still [...]
Remainders: booze, sex, death, etc. edition
Wine, not vodka, pervades Pushkin’s opus — where most histories of Russian literature begin. “This is not a fluke,” says Victor Sonkin. (Via Languor Management.)
Essays in The Blue Book of the Alcoholic examine the relationship between Russian writers and booze. (Also via LM.)
Albert Einstein: brilliant scientist, failed investor, sex maniac. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Jonathan [...]
Alarcón on being read in Peru
Daniel Alarcón, who moved to Alabama from Peru as a kid, nervously anticipates the appearance of his short story collection, War by Candlelight, in the country of his birth.
Certainly the world of Peruvian letters does not need me. There are writers of my generation attacking the same themes I have attempted to address, and many [...]
Weekend remainders
George Saunders visits the U.K. and falls in love with the place. So smitten is he with the mother country, in fact, that he’s calling for “the reconciliation of Britain and the United States into one nation, to be called the United Anti-Terror States Of Britain.”
From Carla Blumenkranz’s My Life and Times in American Publishing, [...]
Pynchon against the day
Hillel Italie investigates The Case of the Disappearing Pynchon Novel Description and extracts confirmation from Penguin that: (1) Pynchon really did write the paragraphs in question, and (2) the book will be called Against the Day.
Thursday afternoon miscellany
Did Thomas Pynchon post a description of his forthcoming novel on his Amazon page?
Scott McLemee speculates that Philip Rieff, best known as Susan Sontag’s ex-husband, may have been the model for the “modern post-religious man” Sontag denounced in Against Interpretation.
Rosemary Goring on Irvine Welsh’s conservatism: “Why the junkie laureate’s volte-face is so hard to [...]
Literary agent sweepstakes
An agent of my acquaintance writes in with news of the “Sobol Award,” a contest sponsored by a literary agent who requires each entrant to plunk down an $85 reading fee and to sign a contract committing to “a one-year, exclusive (all rights) agreement with the Sobol Literary Agency for the work they have submitted.” [...]
Crews and the case of the baby’s stained genitals
Details about the plot of Harry Crews’ latest book emerge in a mixed-to-negative review. (Second item.)
The novella’s center is Major Melton, an ex-Marine now teaching English. He and his wife, Nicky, have an infant son. The baby has an unusual birthmark on his privates.
Major Melton already suspects that his bride has been unfaithful, and the [...]
Tuesday morning miscellany
Pynchonoid uncovers a brief description of Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming novel. The book “span[s] the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I…. [I]t is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is [...]
Funding at Iowa, and T.C. Boyle miscellany
John McNally remembers his years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Despite faculty members’ disdain toward his work, he ended up serving as T.C. Boyle’s research assistant.
When I arrived at the Workshop in the fall of 1987 without funding, I was told by a second-year student (a student who is now a bestselling novelist) that I [...]
Zoe Heller recommends
Asked to recommend a favorite novel, the talented Zoe Heller pointed to Joseph Roth’s 1932 The Radetzky March. She discusses her choice with Chris Lehmann on the NPR website.
Thursday morning miscellany
An exhibition in St. Petersburg tries to reconcile Nabokov the writer with Nabokov the lepidopterologist (butterfly scientist). The show “advance[s] an unusual hypothesis: that Nabokov’s meticulous, masterful prose style grew out of his love affair with science.” (Nabokov’s drawing for his wife, Vera, taken from The Atlantic.)
Terry Teachout says no matter how many times you’ve [...]
Fiction to food
On the verge of 50, Bill Buford relinquished his position as fiction editor at The New Yorker to slave under chef Mario Batali. Tim Adams chronicles Buford’s tranformation, admitting “I loved the idea of Buford suffering as Mario Batali’s kitchen bitch because I was once, for five years or so, Buford’s magazine bitch.” Here’s Adams [...]
Remains of the day
Early Bengali science fiction! (Via Making Light)
Miss Snark, literary agent, talks about what the rise of trade paperback originals means for authors.
Over at the Independent, Michele Roberts wonders if one of my favorite authors, Angela Carter, is still relevant, then quickly comes to her senses. You’re damn right she is.
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