Until Monday
It’s been sunny the past few days, and the fragrant but deadly mint I yanked out of the backyard last summer is re-sprouting, so I guess it really is spring. Or another manifestation of global warming.
Either way, it’s drinking-outdoors weather, and I’m off to enjoy it.
Have a good weekend.
End-of-week miscellany
Pearl Cleage explains why she agreed to read in the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum after “many years of refusing to darken its doorway out of respect for my ancestors who were held in bondage one state over.” (Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind.)
Alasdair Gray blogs. (Via Splinters.)
Samuel Beckett was a generous soul. [...]
Writers’ mail at the Rosenbach
Curtis Sittenfeld extols the many virtues of Philadelphia’s amazing Rosenbach Museum and Library.
Under normal circumstances, reading other people’s mail is pretty enjoyable, but when the correspondents are professional writers, it’s downright thrilling…. [T]he modern writer kvetching about a deadline has nothing on Conrad: “The other day in a moment of mental aberration I allowed myself [...]
Behind Mike Mulligan
James Sullivan has some backstory on Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Katy and the Big Snow. (Via Pete Lit.)
He does not, however, answer the age-old question: “But where did Mike Mulligan pee?”
An exhibit celebrating Burton’s life and work will be up at the GAR Memorial Library in West [...]
Byatt speaks
Michael Silverblatt talks with A.S. Byatt at Lannan. (Via Rake’s Progress. If you want more Byatt audio, try her 1971 interview with Iris Murdoch.)
New Adrian story
Chris Adrian’s A Better Angel appears in the latest New Yorker.
Adrian was far and away, and then even farther away, the best writer in my undergraduate fiction classes at U.F. He went to Iowa for an MFA, and then to med school. His second novel, Children’s Hospital, is out from McSweeney’s [...]
Sarvas on Heti’s Ticknor
Mark Sarvas reviews Sheila Heti’s Ticknor for the “Secrets” issue of Boldtype.
When George Ticknor’s Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti, whose debut short story collection, [...]
Crispin on Foer v. Krauss
“It seems unfair to pit husband against wife for a literary award, even if the prize is a chicken,” says Jessa Crispin, whose judgment — she decides between Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Krauss’ The History of Love — kicks off the second round of the Tournament of Books.
In the end, [...]
The stakes for first fiction
Rosemary Goring doesn’t have much hope for the Scottish literary novel now that “supermarketisation” has hit.
Turn the clock back to Alasdair Gray’s first novel, or Ali Smith’s debut short story collection, and, in today’s climate, the number of copies they sold would not get their second book as far as Waterstone’s unloading bay, let alone [...]
Highsmith exhibit in Switzerland
Maybe the new Swiss exhibit on the secret life of Patricia Highsmith will travel to the States eventually.
For now, though, I’m consoling myself by watching the associated video about, among other things, Highsmith’s affection for snails. She kept them as pets, took walks with them, and once “opened a huge handbag at [...]
Berman sings Whitman
An excuse to mention the Silver Jews concert review at Number One Hit Song: in a Nextbook podcast, David Berman “sets Walt Whitman to music, reads a poem, and talks about his hunger for religion.” I haven’t listened yet.
R.I.P. John McGahern
Irish novelist John McGahern, 71, died today in Dublin after a long struggle with cancer. As the Guardian obituary says, his “semi- autobiographical portraits of rural life in Ireland won him great praise in his home country and beyond.” (Thanks for alerting me to the sad news, Laurie.)
In 2002, Robert McCrum asked McGahern [...]
David Mitchell’s coming-of-age novel
Claire Messud contrasts the “comparatively small scale and straightforward narrative” of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green with his Booker-shortlisted Cloud Atlas.
[Cloud Atlas] is made up of six interwoven narratives spanning centuries and continents, from the mid-1800s to a distant post-apocalyptic future in Hawaii. Each vibrant voice and story is radically different, and at first apparently [...]
Political round-up
TMFTML schools the Boston Herald on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s hand gesture: “We don’t want to be all woppier than thou, but the literal translation of Va fa en culo is ‘Go put it in your ass.’” Sopranos cast members also weigh in.
Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll was freed in Iraq [...]
Inside literary judges’ chambers
The Oxford Literary Festival is underway, and the Times is offering live reports.
Following up on the festival’s TLS event at his own blog, Peter Stothard gives the background on his admission that he’d engaged in “some past ‘literary loutishness’ in promoting my candidate for a literary prize.” The prize was the 1997 Whitbread. The [...]