Cinderella: the sequel
Hilary Mantel imagines the life of Cinderella twenty years later, after the tabloids have turned on her and the prince is searching for a mistress. (See also Carol Burnett’s Snow White: 15 years later.)
Writers congregated at NYPL for Liu Xiaobo protest
Don DeLillo, A.M. Homes, Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, and other PEN members held a New Year’s Eve rally to call for release of Liu Xiaobo.
Goodbye, aughts. Hello… space age?
Happy New Year from frigid (but no longer snowy) Brooklyn.
Wishing you all good things in 2010.
A curmudgeon’s literary paraphernalia
It has not always been so, but few aspects of online aspiring-writer culture are more irritating to me than “literary lifestyle” tips and paraphernalia. (Library-scented perfume. Dictionary wallpaper. Moleskines. Bookshelves fashioned of reference books pulled from library dumpsters. The onslaught is maddening.)
But every curmudgeon is at least something of a hypocrite, and I am [...]
Not the little woman you thought she was
Louisa May Alcott wrote what she called “moral pap for the young” for the money. She also published edgy pulp, and Civil War hospital dispatches.
The art of the ditch
James Salter, who reviews a new book on Sullenberger and US Airways flight 1549, once crash-landed a plane, himself. (Via.)
On J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime
“‘In his lovemaking I now think there was an autistic quality.’” Jonathan Dee contemplates Coetzee’s latest experiment in memoir, and the “‘feeling of a writer deforming his medium.’”
Beijing crackdown continues
A Chinese court has sentenced poet, professor, and dissident Liu Xiaobo to eleven years in prison.
A Burroughs Christmas
The NYPL dips into its archives, examines William S. Burroughs’ Christmastime correspondence.
And the Rand played on: A view from I-95 South
Ayn Rand’s selfishness-meets-the-free-market doctrines may be odious, but she must be taken seriously, argues Scott McLemee, if only for her influence.
[T]he Rand market has never been anything but robust in the years since her death in 1982. Every year, her melodramatic novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1958) have sold at least 100,000 copies [...]
A pitch for Girls Write Now at the holidays
Last year I joined the board of Girls Write Now, a nonprofit organization that pairs at-risk teen girls with professional writers who support them. The pairs meet regularly, alone and in groups, and the girls who finish the program all go on to college.
Amalie, for instance, broke down a little in her first reading [...]
A star, a star! Was Jesus a Gemini?: Xmas miscellany
Some astronomers believe that Jesus was actually born around June 17, 2 B.C., when a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter would have made the planets appear as a single “beacon of light” — the star the Wise Men followed to the stable.
Good will toward men, and biometric fingerprinting: Today’s border agencies would not have let [...]
Winterson on the life of Patricia Highsmith
Jeanette Winterson admires Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith. “Obsession is focused but not linear,” she says, “and this biography is the same.”
The cult of D.E. Rasso
“One of the funniest women on the Internet — actually, one of the funniest women alive — is D.E. Rasso, did you know?” Thanks to The Rumpus’ Elissa Bassist for helping to spread the word.
The year’s debut novels and story collections
Granta editor John Freeman’s list of the best debut fiction of 2009 includes Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore and Paul Harding’s Tinkers.
keep looking »