The 'Not-So-Rough' Guide

“Jack Kerouac‘s ‘lost’ novel The Sea is My Brother, which he wrote during his years as a merchant seaman, is to be published in its entirety for the first time.

“Described by Kerouac as being about ‘man’s simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies,’ the 158-page handwritten manuscript was Kerouac’s first novel, but was not published during his lifetime. He wrote in his notes for the project that the characters were ‘the vanishing American, the big free by, the American Indian, the last of the pioneers, the last of the hoboes.’

“The novel follows the fortunes of Wesley Martin, a man who Kerouac said ‘loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down.’ By contrast another sailor, Kerouac continued, ‘escapes society for the sea, but finds the sea a place of terrible loneliness.'” (via The Guardian)

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The author David Foster Wallace, best known for his novel “Infinite Jest,” “a vast investigation into America as the land of addictions: to television, to drugs, to loneliness,” committed suicide on September 12, 2008 at the age of 46. Wallace, who suffered from depression for more than twenty years, struggled for more than a decade with his unfinished third novel, “The Pale King,” which he hoped would surpass “Infinite Jest.”

In the March 9th issue of The New Yorker, D.T. Max writes about Wallace’s twin struggles:

Although “depression,” writes Max, “often figured in his work,” Wallace “never published a word about his own mental illness.”

As to the public display of grief over Wallace’s death, it was “connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. ‘Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,’ he once said. Good writing should help readers to ‘become less alone inside.'”

“From 1997 on, Wallace worked on a third novel, which he never finished—the ‘Long Thing,’ as he referred to it . . . His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words, and tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work.” (more @ The New Yorker) 

An excerpt from Wallace’s unfinished novel can be found here.

The partial manuscript will be published next year by Little, Brown.

Related: For David Foster Wallace’s survivors, a paper puzzle (via LA Times)

[In 1999, Amherst [College] magazine writer Stacey Schmeidel interviewed Wallace by mail. The feature-length Q & A, titled “Brief Interview With a Five Draft Man,” ran in the Spring 1999 issue of the magazine, and is reprinted here.]

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Ahead of their publication later this year of six new short story collections, Harper Perennial has kicked off promotion of its “2009: Summer of the Short Story” campaign by launching a new blog, Fifty-Two Stories.

As reported by Publishers Weekly, the publishing house announced “that each week in 2009 it is posting a new short story. Some are new stories from Harper Perennial’s original collections or from upcoming hardcovers; some are original contributions never before published anywhere; and some are backlist classics. . . .

“Harper Perennial’s editorial director, Cal Morgan, selects a new story each week and posts it Sunday night. In January, Fifty-Two Stories featured stories by Mary Gaitskill, Tony O’Neill, Simon Van Booy and Tom Piazza. Last week, it posted a previously unpublished story from Louise Erdrich’s new collection, The Red Convertible, which Harper published in January. This week there’s a story by Willa Cather from The Bohemian Girl, a forthcoming selection of Cather’s greatest short works. Future selections include works by Katherine Dunn, Jess Walter, Mark Twain and Dennis Cooper.”

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