Overall tone is blasphemy and damnation
“Don’t read the back. Don’t read the introduction by a noted scholar. Especially don’t look at the cover.” Jack Pendarvis reads Wuthering Heights, wants to build house in Emily Brontë’s brain.
“Don’t read the back. Don’t read the introduction by a noted scholar. Especially don’t look at the cover.” Jack Pendarvis reads Wuthering Heights, wants to build house in Emily Brontë’s brain.
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.”
Charles McGrath, who edited Muriel Spark at The New Yorker, offers a mixed review of Martin Stannard’s Spark biography.
Narrative reprints my 2008 essay, “Conversations You Have at Twenty,” at The Huffington Post.
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 evoke it… We’ve had our difficulties, Twain . . .