Today Granta posts my exchange with Alexander Chee about Jean Rhys’ and Ford Maddox Ford’s affair and the vengeful novels they wrote afterward. The level of acrimony packed into Quartet and When the Wicked Man is comparable to that of the Philip Roth-Claire Bloom book-off, if the Bloom character in I Married a Communist had not only been cast as . . .
According to Russ Kick, containers of Nabokov’s papers at the Library of Congress go public 6/23, when restrictions expire.
Robert Goolrick’s quest to find Thomas Pynchon for a story ended in 1978. And then someone claiming to be a private investigator called with an address…
Cristina Nehring, whose A Vindication of Love I’m reading, once couldn’t find the toilet in her French fiance’s bathroom, used the sink, and broke it off the wall.
A hundred and thirty letters from Edith Wharton to her governess reveal the author’s discomfort with the demands of public life.