Back soon
That’s all from me this week. The intoxicating Emma Garman steps in tomorrow and the first Friday of every month.
The corporate overlords have bestowed two days off early next week for the holiday (despite the routine nonobservance of other national holidays like MLK Day). So I’ll be back on Wednesday — or, [...]
Poetry.com rejection
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has performed a small miracle. She wrote a poem “so awful that that perennial scam, the International Library of Poetry contest,” turned it down. Here’s an excerpt:
I am Mrs. Miriam Abacha a Widow
I salute you in the name of the most high God.
I was the former first lady Federal Republic of [...]
Rehabilitating Verne
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, co-proprietor of Making Light and prominent editor of speculative fiction, admires Maximus Clarke’s defense of H. G. Wells “against the odious John Miller,” but says:
it’s a bit underinformed on the subject of Jules Verne, who, it turns out, was a lot darker, more literary, and more interestingly political than the bowdlerized English [...]
Miscellany
The Library of Congress’ exhibition of “the woodcut in early printed books” ends July 9.
Fifteen Vintage books that will still be read in 100 years’ time? (Via Languor Management.)
Give a book to a friend, for no particular reason, four times a year. (Actually, the project is called “buy a friend a book.” But if you’re [...]
The two Mississippis
Clay Risen, whose musings on reductionist attitudes toward the South I’ve quoted approvingly before, persuasively argues in The New Republic that two eras have come to an end in Mississippi with the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen (for killing three civil rights workers) and the death of Shelby Foote:
there has always been a powerful tension [...]
Undead author not dead
Overheard at The Strand:
Blonde[-haired woman]: I hate Anne Rice.
Brunette: Me too! Isn’t she dead?
Blonde: Oh God, no! Remember, she’s writing that Jesus novel?
Brunette: Oh right. For some reason I always think she’s dead.
(Periodically, Rice holds court on her relatively liberal politics and her religious convictions at her website.)
What is needed
Dana produces photographic evidence of Long Island City’s burgeoning literary scene.
From the archives: Another favorite telephone pole solicitation, this one a special vacation offer found in Tallahassee, Florida.
Candy-coated critiques
A reader named Amy, having read my recent comments about The Believer magazine’s abolition of negative reviews, writes:
you might be amused by the comment in the most recent edition of the Powells’ Bookstore newsletter:
In the interest of good literary citizenship, we fully endorse the kinder, gentler book review policy promoted by the likes of the [...]
Left Behind: now available for your PC
The Left Behind series, in which Christians battle the Antichrist in the End Times while nonbelievers face eternal damnation, is about to become a video game. (Via Boing Boing.)
British Library prepares for digital books
The British Library predicts a sweeping switch from print to digital publishing by 2020.
Speaking at the launch of the Library’s national strategy Chief Executive Lynne Brindley said a study commissioned by the Library projects that by 2020 50 per cent of publications will be available in both print and digital, while a mere 10 per [...]
Maximus Clarke defends H.G. Wells against “eleven paragraphs of bile”
Maximus Clarke, better known in these parts as Mr. Maud, writes to defend H.G. Wells from an attack that appeared in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal.
One of the signature traits of the far right is its compulsion to ferociously attack even long-dead figures whom it perceives as ideologically incorrect. Every reactionary [...]
Coetzee on translating Borges
From J.M. Coetzee’s Stranger Shores essay on Jorge Luis Borges:
Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 into a prosperous middle-class family, in a Buenos Aires where Spanish — to say nothing of Italian — descent was not deemed a social asset. One of his grandmothers was from England; the family chose to stress their [...]
Excuses and summer reading suggestions
Sorry for the slow updates. Like CAAF, I find it nearly impossible to balance nose-to-the-grindstone novel writing and paying work with the kind of blogging schedule I tend to keep around here. (And as our handshake deadline looms, my long-distance writing partner is expecting far more than the original 500 words/day from me.) [...]
Maugham on writers’ self-loathing and Proust’s attempted review heist
From W. Somerset Maugham’s foreward to his quasi-autobiographical novel, Of Human Bondage:
This is a very long novel and I am ashamed to make it longer by writing a preface to it. An author is probably the last person who can write fitly of his own work. In this connexion an instructive story is [...]
Micro remainders
R.I.P., Mr. Shelby Foote.
Female Iranian novelists.
Richard Ford on Percy’s The Moviegoer.
U.K. readers join U.S. counterparts in literary deprivation.
Quick summary of Zoe Heller’s Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child) takedown. (7th item.)
What’s in a [writer's terrible] name?
Idle author interviewed.
Graham Greene evokes oppressive heat.
Hemingway’s godson on Papa.
Rehab novel-in-the-making, with your help. (Via #1.)
A reflection [...]
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