I’ve been looking back over Flannery O’Connor’s previously collected correspondence while awaiting more excerpts from her letters to Betty Hester. Many of her comments about writing are shrewd — and of course I can’t heap enough praise on her fiction. Still, rereading the letters, I have the feeling that O’Connor’s belief in the Absolute Correctness of Catholicism must have made . . .
Mark Helprin rendered me temporarily silent with apoplexy when “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” appeared in Sunday’s Times. But the paralysis abated as the week progressed, and today I answer questions from Gawker’s Alex Balk. Balk admires Helprin’s fiction, but is “extremely wary of his political views, which can be found frequently on the op-ed page of . . .
A spoiler for Dickens fans reading the classics one PDA screen at a time: “It was also the worst of times.”
Newsweek Poland purports to expose late author and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski as a communist spy.
What happens when the writer you admire most becomes your friend?: David Bezmozgis on Leonard Michaels.