Signing off
That’s all for me. Up here in Vancouver, this weekend is Canada day, and down there it’s the Fourth of July! As an American in Canada, I’m looking at nearly a week of patriotic holidays. I’ll be celebrating in the usual ways: poker and sleeping. See you soon.
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.
Summer reading lists
Last week I confessed that, unlike the entire population of Great Britain, I don’t have any philosophers tucked behind my Spiderman comics on the beach this summer. And yes, I do realize I’m a bit of philistine. What to do? Of course, I have the big ideas, but my brain goes all ADD when the [...]
A very natural writer
I missed this interesting interview with Haruki Murakami in the Age – just in case you did too. I love this bit on how his work is conceptualized differently in the West:
Despite what Japan’s most hidebound pundits argue, Murakami’s writing has always been closer to his homeland than the fictional universes of Fitzgerald, Carver [...]
Nothing better for the subway
Who doesn’t need some Romantics on the Ipod this summer? What’s more summery than “Ode to a Grecian Urn” or a fervent attack on industrialism by William Blake? Bloody nothing, that’s what. Download MP3 readings of the major works by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Clare over at the Beeb.
Better than the movie
Over at Slate, Grady Hendrix wonders if the movie tie-in novelization will die a slow painful death by DVD – if the point of movie novelizations was to recreate the experience of a beloved film, why bother if consumers can just watch it endlessly at home? But the beauty of the novelization is that writers [...]
Happy weekend
That’s all from me this week. Thanks for all the great responses to my call for books that make the rest of life fade away. I’ll post your suggestions next week. And if you have a book in mind, don’t be shy. Email me at maud [at] maudnewton dot com.
Truth-in-summer-reading goddess [...]
Thursday morning miscellany
Earlier this week, Spanish TV previewed Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War documentary, made while he served as a war correspondent. The film, Terra de España (The Spanish Earth), contains war footage that had never been aired in Spain. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the conflict. (Program from an American showing [...]
Last Graham Greene interview
John R. MacArthur believes he was the last to interview Graham Greene, then 86, shortly before his death in April, 1991. He recounts Greene’s scathing take on American intervention in Panama and the Gulf War. And here’s Greene on politics in fiction:
“I don’t think one’s novels should be too political,” Greene said [...]
Behind Bush’s New Paradigm: Shades of Louis XIV
In this week’s New Yorker, Jane Mayer reveals the unprecedented influence of David Addington, architect of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror.”
Addington, Cheney’s chief of staff and longtime principal legal adviser, advocates the “New Paradigm,” a legal theory resting “on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share — namely, that the [...]
Spring 2006 Paris Review, in summer
After two months and ten days, five email messages, and one phone call to Jackson, Mississippi, my copy of the Spring 2006 Paris Review finally arrived on Friday.
When I ordered it on April 13, I bitched about having to wait “1-2 weeks.” Now I understand so much more viscerally how painful a protracted [...]
A pot full of steaming something
Amitava Kumar admires the opening of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s “Innocence,” which appeared in a recent New Yorker. He says the author successfully portrays her characters and the relationships between them. But he’s disappointed by the insularity of the people and situations she depicts. A lack of engagement with “what are sometimes called outside forces,” [...]
Tuesday afternoon miscellany
When I visited Edgar Allan Poe’s Bronx house earlier this year, nobody mentioned that a caretaker lives in the basement. “Mr. Mercier, a short-story writer, spoke of Poe’s eerie influence over him. ‘I have to be cautious,’ Mr. Mercier said of living in the cottage, ‘because I start writing in a 19th-century tone. High [...]
News from the Dan Rhodes skyscraper
Dogmatika’s Susan Tomaselli talks with 3am Magazine this week. Her praise for Dan Rhodes — author of Timoleon Vieta Come Home, a small miracle in book form — sent me off to a mysterious site devoted to the author.
“There’s still no official news of a new book,” it informs readers. “We [...]
Proust’s madeline, the pill
In 1998, Pagan Kennedy realized she’d lost access to some of the sensory details of her childhood. She began to imagine a pharmaceutical equivalent to Proust’s madeline — a pill that “could restore lost memories and the powerful emotions connected to them,” that would allow the user to “experience any lost pleasure — a [...]
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