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 knew about her marital separation by peppering. Then census data . . .
Nabokov’s Laura, says John Banville, is “little more than a blurred outline, a preliminary shiver of a novel. And yet.”
Theodora (Roosevelt) Keogh, the mysterious novelist, ballet dancer, wildcat owner, chicken farmer, and president’s granddaughter whose fiction inspires comparisons to Colette, was living in Paris with her first husband, artist Tom Keogh, when The Paris Review started up in the early fifties. As I mentioned in The Week this summer, Tom’s drawing of Keogh (at right) appeared in the first . . .
A little-known Borges story, “La hermana de Eloisa” (Eloisa’s Sister), is published in Spain to mark the author’s 110th birthday.
“There were many of us.” Chinua Achebe rejects the “father of modern African literature” label.