James Hynes’ top ten Halloween recommendations
If Gustave Doré is the artist who captures the true spirit of Halloween — the Celtic notion of a night when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead blurs — then James Hynes is the contemporary writer who does. Unlike most of Doré’s illustrations, though, Hynes’ books are funny. [...]
Voting irregularities, 2006 edition — and No Umbrella
The early reports of election irregularities in Florida really burn me up.
If you’re just joining us: in Broward County, traditionally a Democratic stronghold, some voters are finding their choices flipped from the Democratic candidate to the Republican.
Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center [...]
Original Bambi astonishes David Rakoff
While leafing through the latest print copy of Nextbook — the editors collect web highlights in periodic broadsheets — I discovered that I’d missed David Rakoff’s praise for Bambi, the novel, not the movie. Evidently Disney’s most famous tearjerker was based on a book with “not a trace of anthropomorphized cuteness.”
Bambi’s forest is [...]
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm 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 [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, [...]
Marlon James: lauded hardcover, no paperback?
Geoffrey Philp interviews Jamaican writer Marlon James, whose John Crow’s Devil (“a powerful first novel” about a preacher and a modern-day apostle “driven not by faith but by guilt, in both cases guilt driven by sexual transgressions,” according to the NYTBR) I’ve intended to read for the past year.
The interview — and James’ [...]
Eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse
Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s wholesale dismissal of Emily Dickinson’s poetry in the January 1892 Atlantic Monthly is entertaining in its clueless pomposity.
I can’t find the full piece online, but here’s an excerpt:
It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly [...]
Fear of burning out on a writer
I used to fall in love with a book and then devour the rest of the author’s work in the space of two weeks.
I stopped doing this in my twenties when I ran through Walker Percy’s novels, first to last, after picking up The Moviegoer on the advice [...]
In six words
Wired’s six-word stories — in the spirit of Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” — are making the rounds. Some highlights:
Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses. — Richard Powers
Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved. — Margaret Atwood
New genes demand expression — third eye. — Greg Bear
Easy. Just touch the match to — [...]
Larry Brown publishes, posthumously
It’s been two years since Mississippi writer Larry Brown died, and his unpublished works are starting to trickle out.
Field & Stream has picked up the first nonfiction story he ever wrote, about an albino coon. And his last novel, A Miracle of Catfish, will appear next March in its unfinished form. [...]
The book and its needs
I like Patricia Highsmith’s (above) thoughts on the rewards of steeping yourself in the world of a book you’re writing.
Good books write themselves, and this can be said from a small but successful book like Ripley to longer and greater works of literature. If the writer thinks about his material long enough, until it becomes [...]
Flaubert, Poe, and Darwin: works online
Courtesy of the University of Rouen, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary manuscripts are available online. Says Laila Lalami: “You can see Flaubert’s text as he labored over it: words crossed out, verbs changed; descriptions refined. And you can see various drafts, the final draft, the copy edited version, and the published text of 1873.” There’s more on [...]
Catch-up miscellany explosion
I learned week before last that my indignation at the Ernest Hemingway furniture collection was probably misplaced. Now comes the news that Graham Greene “wonder[ed] if Peter Jones’s decision to sell knickers in a colour called ‘Brighton Rock’ was proof of real fame.” Next thing you know, I’ll find out that Beckett once [...]
Eagleton on Dawkins’ militant rationalism
Like Amitava Kumar, I cut my lit-critical teeth on Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory. Unlike Kumar, though, I haven’t done a very good job in of keeping up with theory in the last several years — or with the position Eagleton has now staked out against it.
But I do admire Eagleton’s essays. In the [...]
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm 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 [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, [...]
Miller and McNally: the vast education conspiracy, part 2
Below, in part two of the vast education conspiracy conversation, John McNally (America’s Report Card) talks with Joe Miller about Cross-X: A Turbulent, Triumphant Season with an Inner-City Debate Squad, and how volunteering as an assistant debate coach for Kansas City’s poorest high school has caused Miller to see American education as “an engine for [...]
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