The latest from Zoë Heller
Zoë Heller’s The Believers ponders the chasm between those who are fundamentally skeptical and those drawn to systems of belief. See also.
Florey’s Script & Scribble: on the death of cursive
My current contribution to NPR’s Books We Like is devoted to Kitty Burns Florey’s Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting:
At five, teary-eyed, I announced to my mother that I never wanted to grow up, because adults’ handwriting was ugly. When she asked what I meant, I pointed [...]
Bookforum’s Cultural Obituaries series to debut 4/9
Bookforum’s “Cultural Obituaries” discussion series begins at the New York Public Library on April 9, with Making Sense of Black Nationalism in the Obama Era, an event organized around a forthcoming piece by Victor LaValle. Yesterday I asked my friend Chris Lehmann — co-editor of the magazine and a fellow [...]
Flannery O’Connor was her own monstrous reader
Flannery O’Connor’s famous acceptance-letter rejection might lead you to believe that she tended not to doubt her writing. Brad Gooch’s new biography reveals otherwise.
At seventeen, O’Connor was invited to contribute to the high school paper. “‘I don’t know how to write,’ Mary Flannery answered. ‘But I can draw.’”
And years later, [...]
NYRB’s third installment of Mailer’s letters
“He’s read a million books and remembered them, but he is not an original thinker.” — Mailer, on Saul Bellow
These are the penalties paid for writing books
“I like to think that after firing this off, Dickens burst into tears, then got on the computer and played Web Sudoku for an hour.”
Impossibility heaped on impossibility
Salman Rushdie pans this year’s Oscar winners, Slumdog Millionaire especially.
Word dead to Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean has abandoned Microsoft Word for Google Docs. (Wish I could get my novel drafts to fit.)
The Smart Set: Lauren Cerand’s weekly events
The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled and posted by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30 pm, 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 Ms. Cerand at lauren [at] maudnewton.com [...]
Happy weekend from the hay hook killer
William Charles Bruce, otherwise known in la casa de Maud as the great-grandfather who killed a man with a hay hook, has always been one of the most compelling characters in my personal deck of Notorious Ancestor Playing Cards. And now he’s the second forbear — his wife Rindia being the first — to [...]
On Marlon James and The Book of Night Women
Last year I met the very talented Marlon James by accident at a PEN event. Afterward, he joined my friends Mark Sarvas and Amitava Kumar, and me, for a marvelous dinner at which I ate too little while drinking brown liquor. James and I talked about William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Jean Rhys, and I [...]
R.I.P. Tayeb Salih
Tayeb Salih, author of Season of Migration to the North, has died. Writer and critic Laila Lalami remembers him at her site.
2008 Tournament of Books
The judges and brackets for the Fifth Annual Tournament of Books are out. I’m judging again. More on that soon.
On Karan Mahajan’s Family Planning
My first contribution to NPR’s Books We Like is devoted to Karan Mahajan’s Family Planning.
Most of us can’t bear to think of our parents having sex. Yet our very existence is proof that they do, or at least once did.
Karan Mahajan’s entertaining first novel, Family Planning, takes this [...]
Charles Dickens’ lost book
Dickens’ house for fallen women inspired a casebook that was probably among the papers he later burned. (Via.)
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