Jumble
Fiction: I’m obsessively checking The Boston Review site for the great James Hynes’ essay on the novels of the great Rupert Thomson. (Yes, this is a personal literary wet dream.) I have it on good authority that the piece will appear in the next issue, which, by my calculations, is March/April 2006. [...]
Vasily Grossman’s transformation
Keith Gessen tracks Vasily Grossman’s transformation from a writer who “understood the rules [of the Soviet regime and intended] to play by them” into one who wrote “as if he had found a truth machine and needed to put everything in the Soviet Union through it.”
Contrary to Gessen’s expectations, however, a new collection [...]
A local Carnival
Nick Mamatas inteviews New Orleans writer Poppy Z. Brite about Mardi Gras.
You’ve been outspoken about the importance of Mardi Gras. Who is criticizing Carnival? I’ve not heard a lot of naysaying within the city (other than our famously backpedaling mayor, who said we should have Carnival, then denied he’d said it, then started spouting off [...]
On Fat Tuesday
New Orleans is still a mess — federal grants are running out, people scattered everywhere are homeless, contribute something if you can — but nothing keeps the city from celebrating Mardi Gras in style. Even the tittie cams are up. (NSFW as the day progresses.)
Also, just in time for Fat Tuesday, a Scottish distillery has [...]
Poe triple-shot
The Villager’s Alex Schmidt investigates the Northern Dispensary, a vacant Greenwich Village building where Edgar Allan Poe was treated for a headcold in 1837.
DJ Hector Romero recalls a fittingly bizarre and morbid 1987 shooting in the Bronx’s Poe Park: “We were right by the Grand Concourse, the big avenue that runs through the Bronx, when [...]
Rambling thoughts on the Beckett Centenary
Last Monday morning an old friend* from Miami called as I was walking out the door. “Sorry, gotta head out to work,” I told him.
“No!” he yelled. “No you don’t. That’s defeatist.”
“Yeah, well, surprise,” I said. “I done been defeated.”
He chose to ignore this. He launched into a lengthy [...]
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that appears Mondays and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren@maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the event’s date in [...]
R.I.P. Octavia Butler
Ed Champion, Tayari Jones, Scott Westerfeld, Cory Doctorow, and Jenny Davidson mourn the passing of Octavia Butler, the pioneering sci-fi writer who died at 58 last Friday.
Here’s Butler talking with Locus Magazine in 2000 about the “myths we live by.”
For instance, the myth of ‘away,’ as in ‘I’ll throw it away.’ Where’s that? [...]
Signing off
That’s all for me. Maud returns on Monday.
Stars back up Leroy fraud
Your source for literary news, Page Six, reports that many of the celebrities who purported to be friends with JT Leroy were in on the hoax. Richard Johnson turns up an old Winona Ryder interview from Vanity Fair, in which Ryder claimed she met Leroy by accident, when she had tix to the opera, but [...]
Biblical economics
Harper’s posts excerpts of another version of American history from “America’s Providential History, by Mark A. Beliles and Stephen K. McDowell, published by the Providence Foundation. The authors hold courses and seminars based on the book that were attended by more than 25,000 people in 2004.”
The loss of Christian character and responsibility led to [...]
Opting out of reading
Teresa Nielsen Hayden reports that Arizona Senate’s Committee on Higher Education has voted to let university and community-college students opt out of required reading assignments they consider personally offensive or pornographic.
The legislation stems from complaints by Christina Trefzger, who attended community colleges and Arizona State University. She said some required reading assigned by instructors [...]
Remains of the day
The Guardian’s excellent World Literature Tour goes to Czechoslovakia, after stops in Poland and Finland, and there’re signs that they’ll actually be getting out of Europe soon.
Another angry sound-off on Google’s scheme to make copyrighted books searchable.
Jamaica Kincaid profiled in the Yale student newspaper.
Malcom Gladwell has a blog now (Via The Millions).
Kurt Vonnegut profiled [...]
Happy weekend
Sorry about the slow week, guys. I’ve been spending evenings holed up writing, and that much time alone with the page always lends the rest of my life an unreal, hollow quality.
I don’t want to jinx my incremental progress by ruminating further, so I’ll just say I can’t get worked up about [...]
Thursday afternoon remainders
The current issue of Narrative Magazine includes “Three Short Pieces” by Padgett Powell and a contribution from Rick Bass.
Ben Rubenstein on music in fiction: “Eudora Welty’s ‘Powerhouse’ and the rhythmic texts of some Beat writers notwithstanding, I’ve usually found that something gets lost in the translation of music to the page, or vice versa.”
Sarah Waters’ [...]
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