“Author Barry Hannah, whose fiction was laced with dark humor and populated by hard-drinking Southerners, died Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss. He was 67. . . . “Hannah’s first novel, ‘Geronimo Rex,’ was published in 1972. It received the William Faulkner prize for writing and was nominated for a National Book Award. His 1996 short [...]
Archive for the ‘Writers & Writing’ Category
R.I.P. – Barry Hannah (1942-2010)
Posted in American South, Books, Literature, Obituaries, Writers & Writing on March 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
R.I.P. – J. D. Salinger (1919-2010)
Posted in Books, Literature, Obituaries, Writers & Writing on January 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
“J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had [...]
Willful Misconduct: The Legal Battle Over Jack Kerouac’s Forged Will
Posted in Books, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Literature, Poets & Poetry, Popular Culture, Writers & Writing on January 12, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
“When Jack Kerouac wrote his will shortly before his death in 1969, he was broke. Forty years later, a ferocious battle rages over his multi-million dollar literary estate. Kerouac, at odds with his third wife, Stella Sampas, had left everything to his mother, Gabrielle Kerouac. But when Gabrielle Kerouac passed away in 1973, her will [...]
Good News, Bad Muse: Do Bad Moods Make for Better Writing?
Posted in Human Behavior, Writers & Writing on November 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“It turns out that ‘low-intensity’ negative moods are linked to better writing than happy moods. As shown in the research of University of New South Wales Psychology Professor Joe Forgas, when we’re not walking on clouds or doing a happy dance, we tend to be more careful and mindful of details. “Forgas has worked extensively [...]
Assaying the Essay: Zadie Smith Asks “Why Do Novelists Write Essays?”
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Writers & Writing on November 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I. [...]
Flannery O’Connor’s “The Complete Stories” Voted Best National Book Award Winner
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Writers & Writing on November 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“In an online poll conducted by the National Book Foundation, [Flannery O'Connor's] collection ‘The Complete Stories’ was named the best work to have won the National Book Award for fiction in the contest’s 60-year history. The competition was steep: other finalists in the poll were ‘The Stories of John Cheever,’ William Faulkner’s ‘Collected Stories,’ ‘The [...]
Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” Shortlist Announced: Roth, Oz, Theroux Face Stiff Competition
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Sex & Gender, Writers & Writing on November 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The story of the seduction of a lesbian by an ageing stage actor, which includes an eye-watering scene with a green dildo, has won Philip Roth the dubious honour of a place on the shortlist for the Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award. “Roth can comfort himself with the fact that a roll call of literary [...]
R.I.P. – Art D’Lugoff (1924-2009)
Posted in Blues & Jazz, Business, Counter Culture, New York City, Performing Arts, Plays & Playwrights, Poets & Poetry, Popular Culture, Popular Music, Rock 'n' Roll, Theater, Writers & Writing on November 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Art D’Lugoff, who was widely regarded as the dean of New York nightclub impresarios and whose storied spot, the Village Gate, was for more than 30 years home to performers as celebrated, and diverse, as Duke Ellington, Allen Ginsberg and John Belushi, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 85 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. [...]
R.I.P. – Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)
Posted in Anthropology, Books, Human Behavior, Obituaries, Writers & Writing on November 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called ‘primitive man’ and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100. . . . “A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of ‘structuralism,’ a school of thought in which universal ‘structures’ were [...]
Not So “Beloved”?: Is Toni Morrison’s Magnum Opus “The Most Overrated Novel Ever”?
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Race, Writers & Writing on October 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The most overrated novel ever has got to be Beloved. Upon its initial publication, it was rightly passed over for the 1988 National Book Award, which went to Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story, while the National Book Critics Circle handed its fiction award instead to Philip Roth for The Counterlife. In protest, forty-eight ‘black critics and black [...]
Mindful Fiction: Marco Roth on “The Rise of the Neuronovel”
Posted in Books, Health & Medicine, Human Behavior, Literature, Writers & Writing on October 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes [...]
You Can Go Home Again: Philip Roth Attends H.S. Reunion Tour of Hometown Newark
Posted in Books, Jewish Life, Literature, U.S. Travel, Writers & Writing on October 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Philip Roth came home again Saturday, which is not so unusual because he’s been a frequent visitor in recent years. ‘As you get older, you get closer to home.’ Roth said this as he entered the Newark Museum yesterday as the surprise guest on a bus tour of Newark. Now 76, the man once called [...]
R.I.P. – Jim Carroll (1950-2009)
Posted in Books, Counter Culture, Obituaries, Poets & Poetry, Popular Culture, Rock 'n' Roll, Writers & Writing on September 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in ‘The Basketball Diaries,’ died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60. . . . “As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper [...]
25 Years After: Orwell’s “1984″ Turns 60
Posted in Books, Literature, Writers & Writing on June 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“[Orwell's] classic was published on 8 June 1949 – and has had a deep impact on millions. Andrew Johnson talks to writers about it – and asks them to cite their favourite reads.” (via The Independent)
Kerouac at the Bat: Jack Kerouac’s Personal Fantasy Baseball Game
Posted in Baseball, Books, Museums & Exhibitions, New York City, Popular Culture, Sports, Writers & Writing on May 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow-Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either [...]
Great Britain to Name 1st Woman, 1st Openly Gay Poet Laureate
Posted in Europe, Literature, Poets & Poetry, Sex & Gender, Writers & Writing on April 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Few positions in public life, apart, perhaps, from Pope or manager of the England football team, have proved quite so unattainable to women over the years as that of Britain’s Poet Laureate. For centuries, from Ben Jonson onwards, the prestigious honour with its peppercorn salary and liquid remuneration of a ‘butt of sack’ has been [...]
Dead Poets Society: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Cervantes Share April “Death Day”
Posted in Books, Literature, Poets & Poetry, Writers & Writing on April 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The 23rd of April is a bad, bad day to be a poet. It’s the cruellest day in the cruellest month, as TS Eliot almost said. “Lots of people know that today is the day William Shakespeare, the greatest poet in the language, was born in 1564 and that it’s the day he died in 1616. [...]
When She Was Good: Has the Culture Caught Up with Mary Gaitskill?
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Sex & Gender, Writers & Writing on April 24, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Good writers show us new places. Great writers give us new ways of looking at the old one. Just as Ruskin enabled a generation of Europeans to see the landscape that was actually in front of them rather than the conventionalized approximations they carried around in their heads, so is Gaitskill one of those rare [...]
Happy 445th Birthday, William Shakespeare! . . . or Not?
Posted in Birthdays, Books, Europe, Literature, Plays & Playwrights, Poets & Poetry, Writers & Writing on April 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Baptized on April 26, 1564, William Shakespeare‘s actual birthday is unknown but is traditionally observed on April 23rd, St. George’s Day. But how likely is it that today is the Bard of Avon’s real birthday? “There is no evidence, alas, to support the popular belief that William Shakespeare was born — as fifty-two years later he was to [...]
Digital Tea Leaves: On eBooks & the Future of Reading & Writing
Posted in Books, Business, Science & Technology, Writers & Writing on April 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Whatever the future holds for printed books, this much is certain: there is no shortage of ink being spilled presently by writers offering their visions of the digital future – In “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,” author Steven Johnson points to two key developments, “the breakthrough success of Amazon’s [...]
