Until soon
Poor Stephany, MaudNewton.com’s Friday blogger, has come down with a raging migraine and can’t post through all the little, floating dots. And I’m on deadline. So it’s going to be quiet around here today.
Be sure to stop by Ron Hogan’s site and read his interview with Dennis Loy Johnson, editor of [...]
Happy weekend
Every year at Halloween I think I’m going to post at length about being forbidden to celebrate the holiday as a child.
(When I was six, my mom turned to televangelists for her religious instruction, began to frequent camp meetings, and substituted Hallelujah parties for trick-or-treating. It was no big deal. After all, [...]
Literary hauntings
At Halloween, ghost stories proliferate. Across the country, newspapers trot out the Edgar Allan Poe references. Salem, Massachusetts, where accused witches were drowned, hosts “haunted happenings” weekends. And news stations and crackpot websites dredge up stories of local hauntings.
In honor of the holiday, here are a few literary ghost stories I’ve [...]
Remainders
A new series of literary talks featuring A.S. Byatt and Doris Lessing as speakers launched on the same night as the Booker Prize ceremony, prompting Mark Sanderson of the Telegraph to argue:
The fact that three such luminaries should choose to ignore the 2004 ceremony suggests that, given there are so many literary awards today, the [...]
Rise of the 2-inch biography “one of the worst things to happen to literature,” says wine writer
Roger Scruton, New Statesman wine columnist, “savours the last of the summer wine in Argentina” in his latest article, but mostly uses the piece as a platform to denounce Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life:
One of the best things to happen to literature in the 20th century was Jorge Luis Borges, who showed us how [...]
Happy birthday, Fran Lebowitz
Fran Lebowitz turned 54 yesterday, and I’m holding out hope that we’ll see her ever-forthcoming new book before her next birthday.
We’re getting closer, anyway; an excerpt, in which Lebowitz argues for the “reinstatement of the state in the church-state equation,” ran in the October issue of Vanity Fair.
For those unfamiliar with Lebowitz’s [...]
Rock the vote. Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Stephen Elliott
By Sean Carman, reporting for MaudNewton.com
Stephen Elliott is a really good dancer; I learn why this is the most important election in 50 years; Looking Forward to It is the most fun, idealistic, and inspiring book of the election season.
Just before 11 p.m. on a Friday night, at a party in a warehouse loft in [...]
n+1’s bookseller conversation: the shocking conclusion
When last we checked in with n+1 magazine, one of the staff of the new, independent endeavor was struggling to sell an issue at a local bookstore.
Two weeks after accepting the issue for sale, the bookstore’s proprietor said that no one among his or her Corrections-crazed patrons had expressed interest in it. If [...]
Writers spell
A number of writers, including Jonathan Ames, Francine Prose, Thomas Beller, James Frey, Tama Janowitz, Alex Kuczynski, Heidi Julavits, and Adam Haslett, will participate in a spelling bee to benefit the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Says Publishers Lunch: “Bee Season author Myla Goldberg may have the natural edge (the film version of [...]
Remainders
Richard Eder begins his review of The Double this way: “The novels of José Saramago invent some unearthly event or circumstance — the kind of ‘what if?’ we find in science fiction — and populate it with a murmurous, hapless, sweetly questing humanity.”
Mark Holcomb considers Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and concludes: “given the stridency [...]
WWAKS?*
Alex Balk and Lindsay Robertson apparently are working on a novel, possibly about ass-fucking.
* What would Ariel Kaminer say?
One week from today
From J. Daniel Janzen’s “The Wrong Man’s Burden (With Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)“:
Take up the Wrong Man’s burden–
Protect the crude ye must;
Partition out the oilfields
To those ye know and trust.
Though Arabs might suspect it
And mind it terribly–
What’s good for Halliburton
Is good for you and me.
Eric Weinberger contemplates Graham Greene’s significance at his centenary:
When [...]
Scatalogical and lewd: the best kind of reading
Although Nathalie Chicha approaches readings as I do* — “the way children down cough syrup: squirming, making faces we can’t help, but also pleased at our own bravery” — she provides a bang-up report from Sunday night’s reading at P.S. 122.
The event featured John Haskell (I Am Not Jackson Pollock) and National Book Award [...]
Remainders
He may be a wholly unremarkable writer, but John Grisham’s presence at a Kerry-Edwards fundraiser “helped push donations to an ‘incredible,’ near-six-figure sum.”
It’s hard to argue with this assessment of Margaret Drabble’s place in the canon:
No serious reader of contemporary British literature can afford to overlook Drabble. She is an example of what is best [...]
On drafts: geniuses, and the rest of us
The University of Texas at Austin has acquired 120 boxes of Don DeLillo’s notes, drafts, typescripts, and other materials related to his novels and plays, “as well as a comprehensive collection of articles and stories, correspondence and unpublished material for the screenplay ‘Game 6.’” Some documents date to 1959, while other materials were written as [...]
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