Hangover reading with Kingsley Amis
Excerpting Kingsley Amis’ Everyday Drinking at length in any discussion thereof is both crucial and inadequate: crucial because nothing anyone could say about it would be as entertaining as the text itself, and inadequate because the only way to convey how consistently funny it is would be to reproduce the book verbatim.
In their persistent [...]
Reading of Fenimore Cooper was never the same
Even some scholars read Mark Twain’s Fenimore Cooper diatribe literally, but the offenses listed in the essay, as in much of the best satire, are greatly exaggerated.
From Borges to Kenzaburo Oe
Mark Twain is often called the father of American literature, but his influence extends across the globe.
Marching as to war — in Mark Twain’s house…
Tom Wolfe’s op-ed reminds Jack Pendarvis of the story that Harriet Beecher Stowe once broke into Mark Twain’s house in the night and started playing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
A hundred years without Mark Twain
Mark Twain, who died a hundred years ago today, entered the world and left with Halley’s Comet. His essays have a permanent place on my bedside table; I read them whenever my own writing stalls. Those perfect verbs, those unexpected but accurate nouns, that distinctive sense of the absurd and limitless ability to [...]
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 [...]
Dispatch from Twain’s final decade
A previously unpublished letter by Mark Twain on the failure of civilization appears in the December Harper’s.
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Aunt Maude: teacher, car dealer — and Twain fan?
Maud is a nickname now, one most of my friends call me, but it started as a pen name. I chose it years ago as a sort of homage to Maude Newton, my great-great aunt, a woman nobody wanted to answer questions about.
For the longest time, I only really [...]
Twain, quote magnet
Quotations scholar says Mark Twain is the most common victim of erroneous quote attribution in the U.S.
Literary quips, observations, and warnings #6
Many writers say that they write what they do because the novels they want to read don’t exist.
I don’t think about my own book quite that way, but to me one of the most frightening things about writing fiction is the corollary to this idea: namely, if you have an [...]
Hannah on writing and Twain
“Just start talking, as Mark Twain did”: from Barry Hannah’s (handwritten) writing tips, scanned at HTML Giant. (Via; via.)
Once more, with feeling: Who Is Mark Twain?
My latest NPR appreciation is of Who Is Mark Twain?, a collection of previously unpublished writings by my favorite essayist. Here’s an excerpt:
Best known for crowd-pleasers like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and for his lucrative speaking tours, Mark Twain was a writer whose livelihood depended on maintaining enough down-home [...]
Whenever Twain was about to publish a book
As a bona fide Twain obsessive, I am of course almost unnaturally excited about Who Is Mark Twain?, a forthcoming compilation of some of the Huck Finn author’s previously unpublished work.
Last December The New Yorker offered a preview: “The Privilege of the Grave,” which sheds light on Twain’s thoughts about death and posthumous publication. [...]
Fitzgerald & Twain
F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed that a Twain quip inspired his reverse-aging story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
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