tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2568018281485731362024-02-20T11:13:28.214-05:00Reader's AlmanacThe official blog of The Library of America<br><br>
<i>Seeking the enduring</i>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.comBlogger457125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-12379118485198658752015-11-03T10:00:00.000-05:002015-11-03T10:00:26.073-05:00Luc Sante takes a “headlong plunge” into the lives of nineteenth-century American poetsOur series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a contribution by Luc Sante, whose new nonfiction work <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Other-Paris-Luc-Sante/dp/0374299323" target="_new">The Other Paris</a></i>, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has already been hailed for its “sneaky genius” by <a href="http://www.latimes.com/books/reviews/la-ca-jc-luc-sante-20151025-story.html">David Ulin</a> in the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>. <br />
<br />
Below, Sante testifies to the unique inspiration he derives from the Library of America collections <em><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=17">American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Freneau to Whitman</a></em> and <em><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=18">American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume Two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals</a></em>.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFfK9VmYm-FbOPqItdtkdQKxcX6CzEcx28y2DxHSCAA6Mvfh5tKk8SNApkpeY3tedsh-pJTtDl0QD1hTdxchXIE5o3ry2ZMTfwPN4lcLO3an31U53aI4n9bYUot2Q_miCiPfuD6rtR26jQ/s1600/51HJ9tV4I9L.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFfK9VmYm-FbOPqItdtkdQKxcX6CzEcx28y2DxHSCAA6Mvfh5tKk8SNApkpeY3tedsh-pJTtDl0QD1hTdxchXIE5o3ry2ZMTfwPN4lcLO3an31U53aI4n9bYUot2Q_miCiPfuD6rtR26jQ/s200/51HJ9tV4I9L.jpg" width="168" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>The Other Paris</i><br />
by Luc Sante<br />
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><blockquote><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>I find myself drawn, again and again, to the capsule biographies in the two volumes of</i> American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. <i>The poets of the nineteenth century were not only poets; not many made their living from academia, let alone literature. They were rich and poor. They were painters, actors, activists, politicians, cranks, investors, lawyers, farmers, hucksters, printers, failures, bureaucrats, physicians, journalists, divines. And many of them wore several of these hats, consecutively or even concurrently; the possibilities for self-invention and re-invention were larger then. John Hollander’s crisply detailed sketches offer a headlong plunge into the air of the nineteenth century that I find irresistible. As a tribute, from these biographical fragments I offer this collective portrait, like an overlay of photographic transparencies.</i></span> <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Lives of the Poets</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Born in Head Tide, Maine. Born in Cherokee Nation near Rome, Georgia. Born at family estate The Forest in Amelia County, Virginia. Born into slavery on plantation of William Horton in Northampton County, North Carolina. Father, a German of Huguenot ancestry, was a herbalist and maker of patent medicines; mother, whose parents were German immigrants, was a spiritualist who believed herself endowed with mediumistic gifts. Father, a native of Vermont, served as legal counsel for Dred Scott. Father was a teacher and lecturer whose lack of success led to family’s frequently moving. Raised by his mother, a member of Campbellite sect Disciples of Christ, who discouraged his interest in literature and treated him severely. Family settled eventually in Spunk Point (now Warsaw), Illinois.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">By his own account, spoke little English before age 14. After father’s death, apprenticed to a tailor; ran away to Philadelphia, where he learned trade of cigar-making. Worked from early age in father's blacksmith shop; received little schooling. Apprenticed to printer, and in his teens worked for <i>The Huron Reflector </i>in Norwalk, Ohio, and <i>Western Aurora</i> in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Following graduation from local high school, worked for six years as cashier in local pool hall, which was also center for legal off-track betting. Educated at Dayton’s public schools; graduated from Central High School, where he was editor of the school paper, class poet, and only black member of his class. While still in high school founded short-lived newspaper <i>The Dayton Tattler</i>, printed by classmate and future aviator Orville Wright. Left school and worked as lawyer’s assistant and in counting-house, becoming self-supporting by age 15.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Deliberately burned left hand (necessitating amputation) as self-punishment for having beaten another young man in fit of misguided jealousy after he had shown attention to Minna Timmins of Boston. Worked as miner and as a cook in the mining camps; spent time among Indians near Mount Shasta, and had a daughter, Cali-Shasta, with a woman of the band. Enjoyed initial acclaim as actor and was called “the American Roscius.” Wrote financially successful household manual <i>The Frugal Housewife</i>. Was also an inventor; patented a knitting machine, a walking doll, and a rotary engine. Entered world of finance with much success, forming his own brokerage company and eventually holding a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Affiliation with Quakers formally dissolved following his participation in a street brawl.</span><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin79Fc1NLBB7CMFpJ87BX5lRRowBtFaEdHSC8c5Y94igeOPJGUWHkVATnkE_pOQu9ZTYGTVgF6q5N26R971VudNcJ4fgSkoFMfYUT9i5GkmvteqTWAuUZB9R4Z7m9teJpvJ0Hv42kKHMdP/s1600/loa_ampo_19th_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin79Fc1NLBB7CMFpJ87BX5lRRowBtFaEdHSC8c5Y94igeOPJGUWHkVATnkE_pOQu9ZTYGTVgF6q5N26R971VudNcJ4fgSkoFMfYUT9i5GkmvteqTWAuUZB9R4Z7m9teJpvJ0Hv42kKHMdP/s200/loa_ampo_19th_1.jpg" width="128" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>American Poetry: The<br />
Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;">After husband’s death moved with sons and stepsons to an uncle’s coffee plantation in Matanzas, Cuba, where she built a small house and began <i>Zophiël, or the Bride of Seven</i>, epic poem concerning the love of a fallen angel for a mortal, based on an episode in apocryphal Book of Tobit. While recuperating from illness, reported having vision of fountain of water and angels playing harps. Following brother’s death at 19, experienced troubling visions he attributed to Satan. After being administered nitrous oxide in a dentist’s office, underwent mystical experience; repeated the experience at frequent intervals, expounding philosophical conclusions from it in <i>The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy. </i>Contributed poetry and visionary prose to <i>The Univercoelum</i>, periodical devoted to ideas of mesmerist Andrew Jackson Davis (known as “the Poughkeepsie seer”). Later volumes were poetic collections <i>Eonchs of Ruby, A Gift of Love; Memoralia; or, Phials of Amber Full of the Tears of Love; </i>the long poem <i>Atlanta: or The True Blessed Island of Poesy; </i>and the play <i>The Sons of Usna: a Tragi-Apotheosis.</i> Under tutelage of Sakurai Keitoku Ajari of Homyoin Temple in Kyoto, converted to Tendai sect of Buddhism. Emperor awarded him Fourth and Third Class Orders of the Rising Sun and Third Class Order of the Sacred Mirror.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Marriage strained because of husband’s objection to many of her public activities. Imprisoned for debt in Fleet Prison; moved to Paris upon release and continued to dodge his many creditors. Traveled to California, where he was briefly jailed for horse theft; escaped with cell-mate and again lived with Indians. Wife Fanny died when her dress caught on fire; he was badly burned putting the flames out. Marriage troubled by his neglect of family responsibilities. Lived increasingly separately from wife and children. Notorious for affair with elderly novelist Alexandre Dumas; photographs of the two of them circulated widely. He and wife, Caddie, had three daughters, Essie, Mable, and Alberta, who later became vaudeville team The Whitman Sisters.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Postmistress of Auburndale, Massachusetts; endured opposition and boycotts from residents opposed to Roman Catholicism. Developed deep interest in American Indians and published <i>A Century of Dishonor</i>, influential account of U.S. government mistreatment and deception; sent a copy to every member of Congress at her own expense. Interested in economic ideas of Henry George; defended anarchists sentenced to death following Haymarket Riot. Lobbied in Washington against the admission of Texas to the Union. Involved in diplomatic maneuvering relating to Spanish-American War and annexation of Philippines, which he enthusiastically supported. Prepared paper for Cleveland convention urging black settlement on borders of California; active thereafter in plans for black emigration and colonization; believed to have traveled to Central America to investigate possibility of purchasing land there for colonization.</span><br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgadBarB-02EyE0ZmwCR1btnDrZi7XcCmiYkMVWzmhQLc01JAvuzvVG2ErJMhM_QFGGulTPTmlO7d8jhe_KnaOT_JcoWefxaINtkGpM7ckaRn_8zMDPaioE-Y05X5_JE3OA89EHzFqd-jxC/s1600/loa_ampo_19th_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgadBarB-02EyE0ZmwCR1btnDrZi7XcCmiYkMVWzmhQLc01JAvuzvVG2ErJMhM_QFGGulTPTmlO7d8jhe_KnaOT_JcoWefxaINtkGpM7ckaRn_8zMDPaioE-Y05X5_JE3OA89EHzFqd-jxC/s200/loa_ampo_19th_2.jpg" width="130" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>American Poetry: The<br />
Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;">Became world-famous for her ride across stage strapped to the back of a horse in the dramatic version of Byron’s “Mazeppa.” Traveled to Great Britain, where privately printed <i>Pacific Poems </i>and manners and costume (sombrero, boots, spurs, and buckskin) gained him fame as “frontier poet.” Returned to U.S. to find that his popularity did not extend there. Local response to his editorial protest in <i>Northern Californian </i>against “indiscriminate massacre” of 60 Wiyot Indians on Guyot’s Island forced him to leave Aracata. Family estate Woodlands was destroyed by stragglers from Sherman’s army; fled to Columbia, South Carolina, and witnessed its burning. Lost home and possessions when Sherman’s army burned Columbia; reduced to extreme poverty.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Left Vilna for Warsaw and was caught up in Napoleon’s retreat during his journey. Contracted lung inflammation; died a few days after leaving Warsaw for Zanowiec, a village near Cracow. Died when caught in a blizzard while walking home. Died during yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans. Drowned while trying to cross the North Canadian River, Oklahoma, in a small boat. During bout of influenza, died in Venice in fall from balcony. Received serious injuries in fall from tree, which led to his death two years later. Died at home; his last intelligible words were “moose” and “Indian.” After settling his affairs, he disappeared into Mexico, writing to a friend: “If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life.” <i>Poems</i> published posthumously, although most of the poems were written when he was in his teens.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;"><b>Sources, in order by paragraph (some items are more than one sentence long):</b><br />
Edward Arlington Robinson, John Rollin Ridge, John Banister Tabb, George Moses Horton, Madison Cawein, Eugene Field, Bret Harte, Edwin Markham, John Hay.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">Alexander L. Posey, Thomas Buchanan Read, Daniel Decatur Emmett, Madison Cawein, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Bret Harte.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">John Jay Chapman, Joaquin Miller, John Howard Payne, Lydia Maria Child, Henry Clay Work, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Neal.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">Maria Gowen Brooks, Thomas Holley Chivers, Manoah Bodman, Benjamin Paul Blood, Thomas Holley Chivers, Ernest Fenollosa.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">Julia Ward Howe, John Howard Payne, Joaquin Miller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Ellery Channing, Bret Harte, Adah Isaacs Menken, Albery Allson Whitman.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">Louise Imogen Guiney, Helen Hunt Jackson, Stuart Merrill, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Hay, James Monroe Whitfield.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">Adah Isaacs Menken, Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte, William Gilmore Simms, Henry Timrod.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Richard Henry Wilde, Alexander L. Posey, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Edward Hamilton Sears, Henry David Thoreau, Ambrose Bierce, John Rollin Ridge.</span></blockquote><b>Luc Sante</b> is the author of the nonfiction books <i>Low Life</i>, <i>Evidence</i>, <i>The Factory of Facts</i>, and <i>Kill All Your Darlings</i>. A contributor to <i>The New York Review of Books</i> since 1981, he is the visiting professor of writing and the history of photography at Bard College and lives in upstate New York.<br />
<br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2013/08/john-hollander-1929.html">John Hollander (1929–2013)</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/12/poem-for-winter-storm-snow-bound-by.html"><i>The</i> poem for a winter storm: <i>Snow-Bound</i> by John Greenleaf Whittier</a></li>
</ul><br />
<b>Recent “Influences” posts:</b><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/10/playwright-turned-novelist-kirk-lynn-on.html">Kirk Lynn</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/10/sara-jaffe-from-james-baldwin-to-lynne.html">Sara Jaffe</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html">Alexandra Kleeman</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/08/amitava-kumar-philip-roth-teaches-me-to.html">Amitava Kumar</a><br />
The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-44710961961459293172015-10-27T10:23:00.001-04:002015-10-27T10:24:11.192-04:00Generous grant matches timeless writing with twenty-first-century printing technologyThe <a href="http://delmas.org/" target="_blank">Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation</a>, a noted sponsor of scholarship in the humanities, has awarded a grant to allow The Library of America to complete the conversion of old film used to manufacture its books.<br />
<br />
With a commitment to keep series volumes permanently in print, Library of America began publishing titles in 1982. In the more than three decades since, printing technology has rapidly changed; early volumes in the series were printed using compositors, cameras, and photographic film to produce the plates used on press. Today, all major printing firms use desktop publishing and digital plates—and virtually no commercial printer is able to use the old film and plates for their presses.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnzzoZg638adB3ILWDGN6jNMsaG6F8X0maXeoPofglck8EYZrZMZ9AW0uGgwcfb2YK0VDh7tNizJxUPwFeznKXmDFgesoh6n4pjcChalkfmftF5sCkJ3is0URY0SABqisLObZbBSLqWClX/s1600/malloy+pic+b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnzzoZg638adB3ILWDGN6jNMsaG6F8X0maXeoPofglck8EYZrZMZ9AW0uGgwcfb2YK0VDh7tNizJxUPwFeznKXmDFgesoh6n4pjcChalkfmftF5sCkJ3is0URY0SABqisLObZbBSLqWClX/s200/malloy+pic+b.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Pages of a Library of America<br />
reprint at Edwards Brothers Malloy<br />
in Ann Arbor, Michigan.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>The challenge: the first 115 titles in the LOA series were still in film—and equally troubling was the fact some of the film in storage was beginning to show signs of age, including warping, scratches, and tears. Thus, in 2006 LOA staff began converting all its old film: digitizing 125,243 pages with ultra-high-resolution scanners; positioning the images so they will correctly align in the book; checking each scan for dust, scratches, warping, and broken letters; and retouching or re-typesetting pages that show signs of damage or wear. <br />
<br />
The process has been both expensive and labor-intensive. But by this past summer all except ten titles had been converted. The remaining titles:<br />
<ul><li><i>Henry Adams: Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education</i></li>
<li><i>William Bartram: Travels & Other Writings</i> </li>
<li><i>Ralph Waldo Emerson: Poems & Translations</i></li>
<li><i>Washington Irving: Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alhambra</i> </li>
<li><i>Washington Irving: History, Tales and Sketches</i></li>
<li><i>Francis Parkman: France and England in North America, vol. I</i></li>
<li><i>Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969–1975</i></li>
<li><i>Eudora Welty: Complete Novels</i></li>
<li><i>Edith Wharton: Novellas & Other Writings</i></li>
<li><i>Richard Wright: Later Works</i></li>
</ul>The generous grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation will allow LOA staff to finish this project during the next year. In fact, the Wharton volume is already in production and will be available again in bookstores in late November.<br />
<br />
<b>Related post:</b><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2013/02/how-library-of-america-book-is-born.html" target="_blank">How a Library of America book is born</a>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-51717627168230912082015-10-20T14:48:00.000-04:002015-10-20T14:48:27.632-04:00Playwright-turned-novelist Kirk Lynn on Joe Brainard, James Thurber, and other influences on Rules for Werewolves<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJTdXbkSDizd16MVLxk_Y21Ktj-TdC50YizgKu2FTdFCa4SSwDKbvT8CAeQLPCWDC__GC3vr_h2atE2FCcW1A02EmtWCfiqrHKEApFanDwXsmfuoeaDfskQwCgLBmaVHFgT7Q0SdXDMrj2/s1600/51m86VqxmmL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJTdXbkSDizd16MVLxk_Y21Ktj-TdC50YizgKu2FTdFCa4SSwDKbvT8CAeQLPCWDC__GC3vr_h2atE2FCcW1A02EmtWCfiqrHKEApFanDwXsmfuoeaDfskQwCgLBmaVHFgT7Q0SdXDMrj2/s200/51m86VqxmmL.jpg" width="133" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Rules for Werewolves</i><br />
by Kirk Lynn<br />
(Melville House, 2015)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Our series of guest posts by contemporary writers discussing their influences continues with a contribution from Austin-based playwright <a href="https://twitter.com/listofbeliefs" target="_blank">Kirk Lynn</a>, whose debut novel, <a href="http://www.mhpbooks.com/books/rules-for-werewolves/" target="_blank"><i>Rules for Werewolves</i></a>, relates the exploits of a group of teenage squatters entirely through dialogue. Critic Greil Marcus is already a fan of the book, stating: “You get caught up with these people. You take sides. And then Kirk Lynn confounds your expectations at every turn.” <br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Joe Brainard</b> taught me everything I know. <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=359" target="_blank"><i>I Remember</i></a> is the greatest American novel that isn’t one. Brainard writes hundreds of sentences over the years that begin, “I remember . . .” and then tells the truth about growing up queer in Oklahoma, becoming an avant-garde painter in New York, and everything in between. It is a litany that wakes you up in its repetition. I keep it on my desk. It’s better than the Internet for browsing.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>The Beauty of the Husband</i> by <b>Anne Carson</b> is another novel that isn’t. It asks the reader to do a lot of the work along with it, which gives me a feeling of companionship. All of Anne Carson’s books are radical, but the narrative in this one was very personal and close to me, so I keep it near. How does love work? And when it stops working, what then?</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>David Markson</b> is an assassin. He killed the American novel, that vampire that gets up again and again, thank god. But read <i>Vanishing Point</i>, or <i>This is Not a Novel</i>, and it’s hard to find a better companion book. Little histories of literature and art, complete in themselves, and totally different from one another. Read <i>Wittgenstein’s Mistress</i>, the book that seems to have taught the author how to write in his own voice. These are all novels told in the connection of ideas, one sentence urging the reader to think about its connection to the next. If there are composers who know how to use silence, David Markson is a writer who knows how to use his reader’s consciousness.</span><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTBUOHpW3WTPSH_7k5kxrS_DZUkIXmNLbvG7HRz7m8yqlOoZowXlYTNGy81yyeOGjypAP2ELDWHjJ2zbeH2ciQgu6UqBRn0yvtXwZ_Z-cFD0mb4lzyRrkbNPGfw2_TmQfy13-jrRMH3hnz/s1600/151009_stein_toklas_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTBUOHpW3WTPSH_7k5kxrS_DZUkIXmNLbvG7HRz7m8yqlOoZowXlYTNGy81yyeOGjypAP2ELDWHjJ2zbeH2ciQgu6UqBRn0yvtXwZ_Z-cFD0mb4lzyRrkbNPGfw2_TmQfy13-jrRMH3hnz/s200/151009_stein_toklas_blog.jpg" width="138" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>The Autobiography of<br />
Alice B. Toklas</i><br />
by Gertrude Stein<br />
(Harcourt, Brace,<br />
and Company, 1933)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Gertrude Stein</b>’s <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=119" target="_blank"><i>Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas</i></a> is one of the books that helped the future arrive. As with so much of the literature I adore, Gertrude Stein sees no reason to abandon humor in order to find intelligence. She sees no reason to abandon fact to write fiction. She sees no reason to let anyone else write Alice B. Toklas’s autobiography. You can go as deep as your tolerance for strangeness and meditation will allow into Gertrude Stein’s oeuvre and always be rewarded, but you can’t go very deep into literature if you won’t dive into this autobiography.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Conversations with Beethoven</i> by <b>Sanford Friedman</b> is the standard of avant-garde elegance. Fact: Unable to hear a lick, Beethoven had to be addressed in writing for the last year of his life. The novel takes the form of the notebooks the composer carried in which people wrote their questions and requests. The maestro spoke his answers, so his responses are not recorded in the novel. It’s a one-sided conversation between the world and a silent Beethoven, but the composer’s passion and outsize personality dominate the narrative and echo in your mind for a good while after you’ve finished the book. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Imago</i> by <b>Octavia E. Butler</b> is all about transformation and becoming something you’re not, both inside and out. I think the book changed me. I don’t read a lot of sci-fi, but if you can get your hands on one or two real gems a year, it’s good for your full mental range—and Butler is one of the perfect mixologists, balancing deep thought and a ripping yarn.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>The Girl Who Owned a City </i>by <b>O. T. Nelson</b> is a weird little wonder that fell into my hands when my middle school teacher, Mrs. Bathke, either assigned it or smuggled it into my life. A strange virus kills off everyone on earth older than twelve and the kids have to figure out how to feed and care for themselves, including how to defend themselves from other terrible twelve-year-olds. Dystopian fiction before it was all the rage. And the author never wrote another book and no one seems to know if he’s alive or dead. </span><br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh__YepY21owIaZbfxszhqdIBHKP3TG8bunpvnsFJjTLNJLgz8YCXibF3G6tAuMGVKHRsWfL1oleFjhKXUDmtzNr_tPq6PhpinOezKEqVzXmvy13gl4nV5eMShT_fD1U-NyWiJuVyC1bjyH/s1600/gothic-1st-us-hc1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh__YepY21owIaZbfxszhqdIBHKP3TG8bunpvnsFJjTLNJLgz8YCXibF3G6tAuMGVKHRsWfL1oleFjhKXUDmtzNr_tPq6PhpinOezKEqVzXmvy13gl4nV5eMShT_fD1U-NyWiJuVyC1bjyH/s200/gothic-1st-us-hc1.jpg" width="130" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Carpenter's Gothic</i><br />
by William Gaddis<br />
(Viking, 1985)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Carpenter’s Gothic</i> could also be subtitled, for me, “the <b>William Gaddis</b> book I could read.” Another novel in dialogue, this one digging into the underbelly of American capitalism and colonialism. I remember falling into a trance and reading quickly. I remember reading bits of it aloud with friends. I remember there’s only one sentence of description and it’s about the leaves outside.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Emily Dickinson</b>, especially <i>The Gorgeous Nothings, </i>can be an angel who responds to doubt. She did her work her way and I’m not half feral enough to get as free as she was, but some corner of the idea that form is personal and the work is its own reward can protect you. And then the work itself is so revelatory and prophetic!</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">And if there is one book that inspired me after I was done with <i>Rules</i> and made me want to get back to the prose, it’s <i>Dept. of Speculation</i> by <b>Jenny Offill</b>. Told in short, aphoristic bursts that find some middle ground between David Markson and Anton Chekhov, this book broke my heart and made want to be a better dad and husband in addition to driving me wild with envy as a writer.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">And <b>Sarah Ruhl</b>’s <i>100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write! </i>Short, sharp, human, hilarious thinking about dialogue and umbrellas and penises. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction or essays, either, but like sci-fi if you get the right one or two a year your brain will thank you. Because these are one hundred essays all jammed into one little book, it can count for a couple years’ worth of essay reading. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvhEkW8WUIg8xXa7OgKRk_0t0b_-3n_JvQaQkelhX2d4ocRQBmx3v5MgICY2dOxEhF5EPq5yMQDWeXZ6E60fkyGOCYD4p-S9TmHMAckkdMB5Kk1OBLbJTQcMbFu_9AmqSjsvoBuUj9b6Pj/s1600/71A2FQFQHRL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvhEkW8WUIg8xXa7OgKRk_0t0b_-3n_JvQaQkelhX2d4ocRQBmx3v5MgICY2dOxEhF5EPq5yMQDWeXZ6E60fkyGOCYD4p-S9TmHMAckkdMB5Kk1OBLbJTQcMbFu_9AmqSjsvoBuUj9b6Pj/s200/71A2FQFQHRL.jpg" width="121" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>James Thurber:<br />
Writings and Drawings</i><br />
(Library of America, 1996)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;">You can convince yourself that <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=7" target="_blank"><b>James Thurber</b></a> is totally legit because he was all over the <i>New Yorker</i>. But you know who might have a problem with that is the ghost of James Thurber. He didn’t have a high opinion of people who had too high an opinion of themselves. But as far as a guide for the kind of writing that doesn’t know whether it’s funny or sad, you can do no better than Thurber. And there is an openness to his formal approach to story, he captures the odd sad moment in cartoons one minute and then stretches them out to a fable and then abandons the pictures and makes short story of the captions in a sequential story like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and then sometimes takes that same conceit and dips it in real sorrow like “The Whip-Poor-Will.” A great guide if you’re looking to get lost in the American voice.</span></blockquote>Kirk Lynn is one of six co-producing artistic directors of Austin’s <a href="http://www.rudemechs.com/" target="_blank">Rude Mechanicals</a> theater collective and also the head of the Playwriting and Directing Area in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. Recent works include <i>Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra</i>, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in New York City in 2014, and the 2014 Lincoln Center commission <a href="http://www.lct.org/shows/stop-hitting-yourself/" target="_blank"><i>Stop Hitting Yourself</i></a>. <br />
<br />
<b>Previous “Influences” posts:</b><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/a-quintessential-black-literary-hero.html">Jabari Asim</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/deborah-baker-on-lafcadio-hearn-and.html">Deborah Baker</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/02/kate-christensen-on-swashbuckling.html">Kate Christensen</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/jennifer-gilmore-on-grace-paley-and-her.html">Jennifer Gilmore</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/lauren-groff-on-profound-generosity-of.html">Lauren Groff</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/lev-grossman-on-ernest-hemingway-verbal.html">Lev Grossman</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/alan-heathcock-on-james-salter-joy.html">Alan Heathcock</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/10/jane-hirshfield-on-czesaw-miosz.html">Jane Hirschfield</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/10/sara-jaffe-from-james-baldwin-to-lynne.html">Sara Jaffe</a> •<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html"> Alexandra Kleeman</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/08/amitava-kumar-philip-roth-teaches-me-to.html">Amitava Kumar</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/01/adam-levin-american-literary-influences.html">Adam Levin</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/09/dawn-mcguire-on-christian-wiman.html">Annie Liontas •</a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html"> </a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/09/dawn-mcguire-on-christian-wiman.html">Dawn McGuire</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/06/dinaw-mengestu-on-american-writers-who.html">Dinaw Mengestu</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/jim-moore-on-how-reading-kenneth.html">Jim Moore</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/maggie-nelson-american-classics-that.html">Manuel Muñoz •</a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html"> </a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/maggie-nelson-american-classics-that.html">Maggie Nelson</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/viet-thanh-nguyen-we-still-live-in.html">Viet Thanh Nguyen</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/08/house-of-walworth-gothic-literature.html">Geoffrey O’Brien</a> <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/12/carl-phillips-on-randall-jarrell-and.html"> •</a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html"> </a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/12/carl-phillips-on-randall-jarrell-and.html">Arthur Phillips •</a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html"> </a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/12/carl-phillips-on-randall-jarrell-and.html">Carl Phillips</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/04/karen-russell-on-how-joy-williams.html">Karen Russell</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/07/timothy-schaffert-on-how-ambrose-bierce.html">Timothy Schaffert</a> <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/mark-statman-on-how-kenneth-koch.html"> •</a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html"> </a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/mark-statman-on-how-kenneth-koch.html">Philip Schultz •</a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html"> </a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/mark-statman-on-how-kenneth-koch.html">Mark Statman</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/03/emma-straub-on-her-formative-influences.html">Emma Straub</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/j-courtney-sullivan-on-who-she-re-reads.html">J. Courtney Sullivan</a> <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/04/adam-wilson-on-being-bested-and.html"> •</a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html"> </a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/04/adam-wilson-on-being-bested-and.html">Ellen Ullman •</a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html"> </a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/04/adam-wilson-on-being-bested-and.html">Adam Wilson</a>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-2663065957848549212015-10-15T10:13:00.000-04:002015-10-15T10:13:03.806-04:00Photos: No stranger in this Village, James Baldwin recognized with official plaqueNew York City laid a claim to one of its most distinguished native sons last Wednesday, October 7, when a plaque honoring James Baldwin was officially unveiled at 81 Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIfnfW5Bodi3uSdSsyVeiuO_pk0Bdv2QZ6ORwx29oG1T6Yyf-vw6ef2BMyi08p3R7iW__xVLgRaa9-wsFqPg9xDrsZ4cGDbo3kxJqpxkil-cMEQOYIzDDKJVuiVk_PwHLIeEcYJA4VY7u1/s1600/151007_baldwin_006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIfnfW5Bodi3uSdSsyVeiuO_pk0Bdv2QZ6ORwx29oG1T6Yyf-vw6ef2BMyi08p3R7iW__xVLgRaa9-wsFqPg9xDrsZ4cGDbo3kxJqpxkil-cMEQOYIzDDKJVuiVk_PwHLIeEcYJA4VY7u1/s400/151007_baldwin_006.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The plaque in honor of James Baldwin at 81 Horatio Street<br />
in New York City, unveiled on Oct. 7, 2015.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Baldwin lived at 81 Horatio Street from 1958 to 1961 and wrote part of his 1962 novel <i>Another Country</i> there. The plaque commemorates his time at the address and acknowledges in a more tacit way the influence Greenwich Village had on Baldwin’s art and activism ever since he first found a refuge there, while still in his teens, in the early 1940s. (Rufus Scott, the doomed protagonist of <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=118" target="_blank"><i>Another Country</i></a>, thinks of the Village as “the place of liberation”—years before real-life events in the neighborhood would give that term added resonance.)<br />
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The plaque is a project of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, with the support of the Two Boots Foundation; its unveiling made an apt coda to the recent citywide <a href="http://arts.columbia.edu/coe/news/2014/year-of-james-baldwin" target="_new">“Year of James Baldwin”</a> marking what would have been the author’s 90th year.<br />
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At the ceremony Library of America publisher Max Rudin was part of a roster of speakers that included James Baldwin’s nephew Trevor Baldwin, writer Fran Lebowitz, and Gregory Pardlo, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. <br />
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Enjoy photos from the scene via the gallery below, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WG3bz5Vg5g&index=1&list=PLOUarB7JkpZJkAj1mx5TcUCxzCdcM7N7T" target="_blank">click here</a> for the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation’s video of the complete ceremony. <br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><b>All photos © Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.</b></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihPChFhWxf97jaH2dL-K2ze0Q_tlFGrZ-Nh2KGbKs3z9clfYWXfTS8hspa0ANYZf0npOyhtdFA7HFX6llAmlGropUXjsGCjLq_9uTggoAOkJV6raVC2FAtOEF6wOeEIRF4AE_e9-BPLsct/s1600/151007_baldwin_004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihPChFhWxf97jaH2dL-K2ze0Q_tlFGrZ-Nh2KGbKs3z9clfYWXfTS8hspa0ANYZf0npOyhtdFA7HFX6llAmlGropUXjsGCjLq_9uTggoAOkJV6raVC2FAtOEF6wOeEIRF4AE_e9-BPLsct/s400/151007_baldwin_004.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Trevor Baldwin addresses the crowd on Oct. 7, 2015. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYZL7_l5319EUmJpF57sRXw7g8xmEgLaPXpnWvdE7OwuNWHYrRjwXfTnT7nnNp2s2xXTURND4qK3wHag-UkTvAjhk1Ro9d5flOf2e-Rl_X7tWatIz7IDP-4wDckmJxfWBXY3-5Ys0G4Ek5/s1600/151007_baldwin_003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYZL7_l5319EUmJpF57sRXw7g8xmEgLaPXpnWvdE7OwuNWHYrRjwXfTnT7nnNp2s2xXTURND4qK3wHag-UkTvAjhk1Ro9d5flOf2e-Rl_X7tWatIz7IDP-4wDckmJxfWBXY3-5Ys0G4Ek5/s400/151007_baldwin_003.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Library of America Publisher Max Rudin, writer Fran Lebowitz,<br />
and Karen Loew of the Greenwich Village Society for<br />
Historic Preservation before the unveiling on Oct. 7, 2015.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyNYfKiNU0stQpr3YJI_v2_OcTC_lW85KQKhpBjakBKnVhIKWjwH-nmD7bGi3bAAwVeaEY67zJHZD3ExVxe3mkI_hXvBmmJqorHNEfIJ7QvCqkM0XiGrKSaXOE368_ytz1Jq-x40QiaP0I/s1600/151007_baldwin_005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyNYfKiNU0stQpr3YJI_v2_OcTC_lW85KQKhpBjakBKnVhIKWjwH-nmD7bGi3bAAwVeaEY67zJHZD3ExVxe3mkI_hXvBmmJqorHNEfIJ7QvCqkM0XiGrKSaXOE368_ytz1Jq-x40QiaP0I/s400/151007_baldwin_005.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Max Rudin offers remarks on Oct. 7, 2015.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuMtkxHF6ad_OE6ZlBbiWN_es1kQI9i18lCy4rxaRsvKxcwI3Etz0TLA83rDibwZRrzkICFRKWi2cQccp-fR7LsKQ3qPBQyH11VFWvm03japYCCuRQyr3SD-JlPz1xxQXJ2xRG04ehs1JE/s1600/151007_baldwin_002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuMtkxHF6ad_OE6ZlBbiWN_es1kQI9i18lCy4rxaRsvKxcwI3Etz0TLA83rDibwZRrzkICFRKWi2cQccp-fR7LsKQ3qPBQyH11VFWvm03japYCCuRQyr3SD-JlPz1xxQXJ2xRG04ehs1JE/s400/151007_baldwin_002.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A crowd fills Horatio Street to hear Fran Lebowitz speak<br />
from the stoop (far right) on Oct. 7, 2015.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=432" target="_blank">Click here</a> for complete information on <i>Later Novels</i>, the third and final volume in The Library of America’s Baldwin edition. <br />
<br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/photos-at-edith-whartons-house-james.html">Photos: At Edith Wharton’s house, James Baldwin receives his due </a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/photos-at-edith-whartons-house-james.html">James Baldwin, resurgent on screen and on the page in 2015</a></li>
</ul>
The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-33028560586158670272015-10-14T09:34:00.000-04:002015-10-14T09:34:45.843-04:00Listen: Library of America makes rediscovered genre masterworks available in audio, digital formats<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzozqJJyZ-O7fqQWocI_7a3VrzoSbJIIaIVYYGDSIBJ0WaAkos9dRKn8yRIq0eINrNe9bE5hNpuoAXwJIFXU0HNZwUptkN5aX73D4LuhWx7evpgIJ7Gq_ykDbCxmm5BWuJ1eoANqc2HZHn/s1600/151014_ebooks_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzozqJJyZ-O7fqQWocI_7a3VrzoSbJIIaIVYYGDSIBJ0WaAkos9dRKn8yRIq0eINrNe9bE5hNpuoAXwJIFXU0HNZwUptkN5aX73D4LuhWx7evpgIJ7Gq_ykDbCxmm5BWuJ1eoANqc2HZHn/s200/151014_ebooks_blog.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Library of America e-book editions of<br />
<i>The Horizontal Man</i> and <i>Fools’ Gold</i>.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>What’s old is new again this fall, when The Library of America simultaneously releases two rediscovered mystery-suspense novels—<i>The Horizontal Man</i> (1946) by Helen Eustis and <i>Fools’ Gold</i> (1958) by Dolores Hitchens—in both audiobook and e-book editions. The two works mark The Library of America's first foray into the audiobook medium. <br />
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<i>The Horizontal Man</i> and <i>Fools’ Gold</i> are part of the new LOA two-volume collection <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=430">Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s</a></i>, which restores to print eight unjustly overlooked or neglected noir novels of the mid-twentieth century. Surveying the <i>Women Crime Writers</i> set last month in the <i><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-queens-of-crime-144200416" target="_new">Wall Street Journal</a></i>, Terry Teachout singled out these two books for particular praise: “Each of them is smartly plotted, tautly written, sharply characterized and not at all dated.”<br />
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The Library of America has drawn on established talent for its inaugural audiobook productions. The reader for <i>The Horizontal Man</i> is veteran actress <a href="http://www.barbararosenblat.com/home.html" target="_new">Barbara Rosenblat</a> (<i>Orange Is the New Black</i>), an acclaimed reader with hundreds of titles to her credit, while <i>Fools’ Gold</i> is read by <a href="http://scottbrick.net/" target="_new">Scott Brick</a>, another experienced narrator whose résumé includes literary classics like <i>In Cold Blood</i> and <i>Light in August</i>. Patti Pirooz, the former publisher of audiobooks at Penguin, produced both <i>The Horizontal Man</i> and <i>Fools’ Gold</i>. <br />
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As a special bonus feature, both audiobooks include commentary by <a href="http://www.sarahweinman.com/" target="_new">Sarah Weinman</a>, editor of <i>Women Crime Writers</i> and an authority on mystery-suspense fiction. <br />
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Listen to an excerpt from <i>The Horizontal Man</i>: <br />
<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/214702350&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=true&show_comments=false&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Buy from <a href="http://www.audible.com/pd/Mysteries-Thrillers/The-Horizontal-Man-Audiobook/B012EHSFDK/ref=a_search_c4_1_4_srTtl?qid=1444759876&sr=1-4">Audible</a> • Buy from <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/horizontal-man-library-america/id1023013881">iBooks</a></span><br />
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Listen to a <i>Fools’ Gold</i> excerpt:<br />
<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/215692185&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=true&show_comments=false&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Buy from <a href="http://www.audible.com/pd/Mysteries-Thrillers/Fools-Gold-Audiobook/B012ECPFH4/ref=a_search_c4_1_1_srTtl?qid=1444759876&sr=1-1" target="_new">Audible</a> • Buy from <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/fools-gold-library-america/id1023014091">iBooks</a></span><br />
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Meanwhile, e-book editions of <i>The Horizontal Man</i> and <i>Fools’ Gold</i> arrive in response to ongoing demand for Library of America books in electronic form. Click on the relevant links below for specific e-book platforms. <br />
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<b><i>The Horizontal Man</i></b><br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Horizontal-Man-Library-America-Classic-ebook/dp/B011G4DT42/" target="_blank">Kindle</a> • <a href="https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/the-horizontal-man" target="_blank">Kobo</a> • <a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Helen_Eustis_The_Horizontal_Man?id=s9smCgAAQBAJ" target="_blank">Google Books</a> • <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-horizontal-man/id1018672833?mt=11">iBooks</a> • <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-horizontal-man-helen-eustis/1122291934?ean=9781598534580" target="_blank">Nook</a> <br />
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<b><i>Fools’ Gold</i></b><br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fools-Gold-Library-America-Classic-ebook/dp/B011G4EA1I/" target="_blank">Kindle</a> • <a href="https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/fools-gold-7" target="_blank">Kobo</a> • <a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Dolores_Hitchens_Fools_Gold?id=2NsmCgAAQBAJ" target="_blank">Google Books</a> • <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/fools-gold/id1018672827?mt=11">iBooks</a> • <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fools-gold-dolores-hitchens/1122291919?ean=9781598534597" target="_blank">Nook</a><br />
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Watch <i>Reader’s Almanac</i> for information on new Library of America audiobooks and e-books in the months ahead. <br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Visit the <i>Women Crime Writers</i> <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/">companion website</a> for complete information on <i>The Horizontal Man</i> and <i>Fools’ Gold</i> and their authors, along with appreciations by contemporary writers and related contextual material.</b></span><br />
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<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/listen-lost-suspense-masterwork-returns.html">Listen: Lost suspense masterwork returns to life in second Library of America audiobook</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/orange-is-new-black-star-is-voice.html"><i>Orange Is the New Black</i> star is the voice behind first Library of America audiobook</a></li>
</ul>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-91079738188192527712015-10-08T10:01:00.001-04:002015-10-08T10:01:09.396-04:00Sara Jaffe: From James Baldwin to Lynne Tillman—four influences on Dryland<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMcWdIxuMIy2aLb6ADVC8idxooeuXGUgSN0NgJn60iGeL_VqR5wFwll7gBQGENccU1aQopVpA9oyl2MxZVeJWJBcLrLCbiAstIY2jrzWpgprRuRs6ILvmonh_UR0f921IAYflPClZq41bd/s1600/61dN9WAKlfL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMcWdIxuMIy2aLb6ADVC8idxooeuXGUgSN0NgJn60iGeL_VqR5wFwll7gBQGENccU1aQopVpA9oyl2MxZVeJWJBcLrLCbiAstIY2jrzWpgprRuRs6ILvmonh_UR0f921IAYflPClZq41bd/s200/61dN9WAKlfL.jpg" width="128" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Dryland</i> by Sara Jaffe<br />
(Tin House Books, 2015)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Our series of guest posts by writers of fiction, poetry, essays, and history continues today with a contribution from <a href="http://sarajaffewriter.com/about/" target="_blank"><b>Sara Jaffe</b></a>, whose just-published debut novel <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781941040133-2" target="_new"><i>Dryland</i></a> is a coming-of-age story set in Portland, Oregon, in the early 1990s. The novel is drawing praise from a number of other writers: novelist Justin Torres (<i>We the Animals</i>) has cited Jaffe as “an important new voice” and Sara Marcus (<i>Girls to the Front</i>) called the book “a gorgeous, layered, meticulous, clamoring, beating heart of a thing.”<br />
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Below, Jaffe discusses four authors who have influenced both her writing in general and <i>Dryland</i> in particular.<br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=118" target="_blank"><b>James Baldwin, <i>Giovanni’s Room</i>.</b></a> When I was living in San Francisco, I had a sudden desire to re-read <i>Giovanni’s Room</i> and discovered I no longer had a copy. I ran out to the used bookstore and bought one. Upon arriving home and opening the book, I discovered an inscription: from S., my first real girlfriend, with whom I’d had a very prolonged and dramatic breakup, to the girl she dated after me. It was too perfect. <i>Giovanni’s Room</i> is a novel of love and doom in equal measure. And though the ultimate doom of Giovanni’s death may bookend the novel, the few scenes in the middle that describe the night David and Giovanni meet and first start to fall for each other are like gay love candy—so vivid, heady, and sweet.<br />
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Part of the reason it works so well is that, though the story is told through David’s first-person point-of-view, he’s in such deep denial about his attraction to Giovanni that it takes the older queens calling him out for us to fully get the sense of what’s going on. We get both the subjective thrill of David’s unnamed excitement and the vicarious thrill of Jacques and the others watching and naming it. It’s such a deft and interesting use of the first person, because it doesn’t put the onus on the reader to identify with David; rather, it allows us to observe him. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk4tIxwaii882tk9h_HXLrsMyjkQgQxYhb7tkJiwWRilGYSABODoOnQNeUCcy87LvNXDEyvz5VtoIWXQFpQG6SxHttqV_LTfAJRGVOtHNKYltomVHokEkMuc41z11Il1pcc-XnioqnMxPA/s1600/AsILayDying.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk4tIxwaii882tk9h_HXLrsMyjkQgQxYhb7tkJiwWRilGYSABODoOnQNeUCcy87LvNXDEyvz5VtoIWXQFpQG6SxHttqV_LTfAJRGVOtHNKYltomVHokEkMuc41z11Il1pcc-XnioqnMxPA/s200/AsILayDying.jpg" width="136" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>As I Lay Dying</i><br />
by William Faulkner<br />
(Cape & Smith, 1930)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;"><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=42" target="_blank"><b>William Faulkner, <i>As I Lay Dying</i>.</b></a> “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” I still have my copy of <i>As I Lay Dying </i>from college, with that sentence, at the end of one of Dewey Dell’s sections, underlined. I think it was one of the first times I underlined a sentence in a novel not for what it had to do, in whatever convoluted and out-of-context manner, with <i>me</i>, but because I was so moved by the language itself. Every syllable pulses, and the image is indelible. <i>As I Lay Dying</i> did something to my ear, forever changed it. The novel marks when I began to seek tension-action-drama in the relationship of words to each other in a sentence, rather than (solely) at the level of narrative.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Jane Bowles, <i>My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles</i>.</b> I find it very difficult to describe the particular strangeness of a Jane Bowles story. Each character is so tightly contained in his or her own universe, utterly incapable of—or uninterested in—understanding why any other person says or does anything. A friend once described Bowles’s characters as having no interiority, but I don’t think that’s exactly it—it’s as if their interiors are turned outward, as if they lead with interiority, their speech and actions hindered by neither societal conventions, self-consciousness, nor self-awareness. In such a landscape, there’s no such thing as contradiction. And causality itself becomes completely upended, doing miraculous things to plot. What “happens” is dictated only by each character’s peculiar, particular logic. Bowles’s writing is soaked in an anxiety I recognize.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">I don’t know if or how Jane Bowles actually shows up in my writing. I don’t discard psychological realism. But, in writing <i>Dryland</i>, when I was up against a passage that I had trouble wresting from cliche, I opened up a document called “Mrs. Copperfield” and tried to write it in a Bowlesian style. It helped me locate productive disconnections between characters, and to make characters’ actions and emotions unfamiliar to themselves.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgrsTRi5pv2cjuI17vZU23NHR4suzGY5opXvHsH5EUWl8m6Z90G3pvwAP0S9C7a8eT0fcuGw0telEdDOI5Sg_KcvSQrtfxewy_vuiyzTbxgnlv1nzOVJXCVONBj-3u70cq9CV0KwMKWvRi/s1600/tillmanlg.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgrsTRi5pv2cjuI17vZU23NHR4suzGY5opXvHsH5EUWl8m6Z90G3pvwAP0S9C7a8eT0fcuGw0telEdDOI5Sg_KcvSQrtfxewy_vuiyzTbxgnlv1nzOVJXCVONBj-3u70cq9CV0KwMKWvRi/s200/tillmanlg.gif" width="130" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Haunted Houses</i><br />
by Lynne Tillman<br />
(Poseidon Press, 1987)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Lynne Tillman, <i>Haunted Houses</i>.</b> In the conventional <i>bildungsroman</i>, the protagonist is set on a path of self-discovery, and once he or she discovers what needs to be discovered, he or she changes, or comes right up to the cusp of change. But in <i>Haunted Houses</i>, Tillman’s first novel, the three protagonists—Grace, Emily, and Jane, who exist in parallel chapters but never meet—do not change, not really. Or, maybe more accurately, Tillman doesn’t foreground a narrative of change, or development, in any conventional sense. Her characters accrue experiences, they move through their lives, they think and act but when you remove the imperative of change each thought and action achieves a kind of parity with each other. In the resulting flatness, we feel the grain of lived experience—what it is to be a person in a body in the world.</span></blockquote>Sara Jaffe’s fiction has appeared in such publications as <i>Fence</i> and <i>BOMB</i> and she co-edited <i>The Art of Touring</i> (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians based on her experience as guitarist (1999–2004) for the post-punk band Erase Errata. Jaffe currently lives and teaches in Portland. <br />
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<b>Previous “Influences” posts:</b><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/a-quintessential-black-literary-hero.html">Jabari Asim</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/deborah-baker-on-lafcadio-hearn-and.html">Deborah Baker</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/02/kate-christensen-on-swashbuckling.html">Kate Christensen</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/jennifer-gilmore-on-grace-paley-and-her.html">Jennifer Gilmore</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/lauren-groff-on-profound-generosity-of.html">Lauren Groff</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/lev-grossman-on-ernest-hemingway-verbal.html">Lev Grossman</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/alan-heathcock-on-james-salter-joy.html">Alan Heathcock</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/10/jane-hirshfield-on-czesaw-miosz.html">Jane Hirschfield</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/09/alexandra-kleeman-philip-k-dicks.html">Alexandra Kleeman</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/08/amitava-kumar-philip-roth-teaches-me-to.html">Amitava Kumar</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/01/adam-levin-american-literary-influences.html">Adam Levin</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/annie-liontas-influences-identity-and.html">Annie Liontas</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/09/dawn-mcguire-on-christian-wiman.html">Dawn McGuire</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/06/dinaw-mengestu-on-american-writers-who.html">Dinaw Mengestu</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/jim-moore-on-how-reading-kenneth.html">Jim Moore</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/05/nobody-knows-my-name-manuel-munoz-on.html">Manuel Muñoz</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/maggie-nelson-american-classics-that.html">Maggie Nelson</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/viet-thanh-nguyen-we-still-live-in.html">Viet Thanh Nguyen</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/08/house-of-walworth-gothic-literature.html">Geoffrey O’Brien</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/05/arthur-phillips-probes-seamless-circle.html">Arthur Phillips</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/12/carl-phillips-on-randall-jarrell-and.html">Carl Phillips</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/04/karen-russell-on-how-joy-williams.html">Karen Russell</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/07/timothy-schaffert-on-how-ambrose-bierce.html">Timothy Schaffert</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/01/philip-schultz-on-robert-longs-blue.html">Philip Schultz</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/mark-statman-on-how-kenneth-koch.html">Mark Statman</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/03/emma-straub-on-her-formative-influences.html">Emma Straub</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/j-courtney-sullivan-on-who-she-re-reads.html">J. Courtney Sullivan</a> • <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/ellen-ullman-on-her-dark-kinship-with.html">Ellen Ullman</a><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/04/adam-wilson-on-being-bested-and.html">Adam Wilson</a>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-3990451514473424982015-10-02T09:25:00.000-04:002015-10-05T15:11:19.963-04:00Morgan Library exhibition presents an Ernest Hemingway for the twenty-first centuryLibrary of America fans are strongly encouraged to visit the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City for the new exhibition <a href="http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/ernest-hemingway" target="_blank"><i>Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars</i></a>, a revelatory re-examination of a writer whose outsized fame has often threatened to overshadow everything that’s best about his work. <br />
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Organized in partnership with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, the show is a bonanza of manuscripts and typescripts, first editions, correspondence, and personal mementos. It follows Hemingway from his service as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, where he was badly wounded, to his stint as a war correspondent accompanying Allied troops across France in 1944–45. (Hemingway’s October 1944 dispatch for <i>Collier’s</i>, “How We Came to Paris,” is included in the Library of America anthology <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=116">Reporting World War II: Volume Two: American Journalism 1944–1946</a>.)</i><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVzkzbsdRShSV3bXEbzkZa0j0A6isPV2Nl7T7OCh4tj0M4L1KIBM0TzzPtQlcrV0rg2h7HNd1vp6dyHfurgc80E4iKuS3QBR2ox5HScASUPrXuieWC-z4Qs1_JTZtSMOTXNyzD9Nl3K1rE/s1600/151001_hemingway_passport.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="273" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVzkzbsdRShSV3bXEbzkZa0j0A6isPV2Nl7T7OCh4tj0M4L1KIBM0TzzPtQlcrV0rg2h7HNd1vp6dyHfurgc80E4iKuS3QBR2ox5HScASUPrXuieWC-z4Qs1_JTZtSMOTXNyzD9Nl3K1rE/s320/151001_hemingway_passport.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Hemingway’s 1923 passport (detail).<br />
The Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection.<br />
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.</span></td></tr>
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With an emphasis on his Paris years (1921–28) and on the craft of writing, <i>Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars</i> is unmistakably meant to supplant memories of Hemingway’s later public persona—the overbearing “Papa,” who starred in ads for Ballantine Ale and Parker 51 pens and who was invariably photographed in the pages of <i>LIFE</i> and <i>Look</i> with a shotgun or fishing rod in hand. <br />
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Instead, the exhibition foregrounds the ambitious young talent with avant-garde leanings who adopted Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound as his mentors soon after arriving in Paris and who claimed he learned how to write from studying Cezanne paintings at the Musée du Luxembourg. These were the years when he set about forging the deceptively simple prose style that would become an inescapable influence on generations of American writers. <br />
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Stein’s advice after reading Hemingway’s work for the first time was “Begin over again and concentrate.” The most illuminating aspect of the Morgan exhibition is how keenly he took those words to heart. Manuscript pages on display reveal a determined self-editor who could cut eight pages from the beginning of the story “Indian Camp” in 1924 and two entire chapters from the opening of <i>The Sun Also Rises</i> two years later. These and the other revisions documented in the exhibit make it clear we can all be grateful Hemingway made the choices he did. (Another revelation: the author had to fight to convince his squeamish publishers to keep the term “bed pan” in <i>A Farewell to Arms</i>.) <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3P771MIKE8Ud1kZ21aTTTSGsvJAdiUwhwxG1Yjf7dY-om5gwc7-Oed0LcBatcC2n5wvV4IgxnNL05P0tOQQdRrJZeHaFXUI25CgYpuHVjns9wSDVVmWn6uJ-ujvLSGJTaJN_ebZ5NB1ep/s1600/151001_3_stories_hemingway.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3P771MIKE8Ud1kZ21aTTTSGsvJAdiUwhwxG1Yjf7dY-om5gwc7-Oed0LcBatcC2n5wvV4IgxnNL05P0tOQQdRrJZeHaFXUI25CgYpuHVjns9wSDVVmWn6uJ-ujvLSGJTaJN_ebZ5NB1ep/s320/151001_3_stories_hemingway.jpg" width="216" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Three Stories & Ten Poems</i>, [Paris]: Contact <br />
Publishing Co., 1923. The Carter Burden Collection of <br />
American Literature, The Morgan Library & Museum,<br />
photography by Graham S. Haber, 2014.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>For Hemingway devotees, there will be a special appeal in seeing physical copies of his rare early publications like 1923’s <i>Three Stories & Ten Poems</i> (printed in an edition of 300) and the first, 1924 version of <i>In Our Time</i> (printed in an edition of 170). Meanwhile, many of the other items on display—such as the ticket stubs from bullfights in Pamplona and Madrid, and an encouraging letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald written on ocean liner stationery—are redolent of an old-fashioned expatriate glamour. <br />
<br />
Winding down at the close of World War II, the exhibition sidesteps the saga of Hemingway’s later years, when drinking, depression, and a staggering number of medical problems took their toll on both his writing and his psyche. Yet the Morgan’s curator, Declan Kiely, manages to close on a fascinating forward-looking note.<br />
<br />
One of the last items on view is a 1945 letter to Hemingway from J. D. Salinger, written when the latter was recovering from what was then euphemistically known as “combat fatigue” in a U.S. Army hospital in Nuremburg, Germany. The two men had met briefly in Paris just after its liberation in 1944, an encounter Salinger recalls as “the only helpful minutes of the whole business.” It’s increasingly a <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/02/salinger-201102" target="_blank">critical</a> <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10283676/JD-Salingers-five-unpublished-titles-revealed-and-how-Second-World-War-shaped-his-thinking.html" target="_blank">commonplace</a> to read <i>The Catcher in the Rye</i> as a kind of sublimated war novel, but the less obvious parallel is between the stark purity of Hemingway’s early stories and the Zen distillations of Salinger’s short fiction, which date from more than a generation later. By drawing that line, the exhibition hints at some tantalizing potential affinities that can enhance our appreciation of both authors and of American writing over a forty-year period.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;"><b><i>Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars</i><b> is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City through January 31, 2016. Visit <a href="http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/ernest-hemingway">themorgan.org</a> for complete exhibition information. </b></b></span><br />
<br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/lev-grossman-on-ernest-hemingway-verbal.html">Lev Grossman on Ernest Hemingway, verbal membrane, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sun Also Rises</i></a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/errol-louis-on-ernest-hemingway.html">Errol Louis on Ernest Hemingway, Westbrook Pegler, and other great “deadline artists”</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/09/maxwell-perkins-editor-of-f-scott.html">Maxwell Perkins: editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell, and Thomas Wolfe</a></li>
</ul>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-37033698828323219422015-09-22T11:50:00.002-04:002015-09-22T12:01:36.719-04:00Photos: At Edith Wharton’s House, James Baldwin Receives His Due <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM372izkCsvGgjg69GRxe7RtFbQB1Sqdp381JWirjXdA6T-E-X3ehz9wWSkNDeban88jGCARms8GVaVi9ovRcOkNoPqMDh5RkgXVd0aG6GUv5SIdeWhbsWav4pXgwNRh1YUKH3XvNU6lC2/s1600/150922_pinckney_baldwin02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM372izkCsvGgjg69GRxe7RtFbQB1Sqdp381JWirjXdA6T-E-X3ehz9wWSkNDeban88jGCARms8GVaVi9ovRcOkNoPqMDh5RkgXVd0aG6GUv5SIdeWhbsWav4pXgwNRh1YUKH3XvNU6lC2/s400/150922_pinckney_baldwin02.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Kate Bolick and Darryl Pinckney<br />
at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts on Sept. 17, 2015.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
In a moment of literary serendipity last Thursday, one writer in The Library of America series was honored at the home of another when James Baldwin was the subject of a public program at <a href="http://www.edithwharton.org/programs-and-events/touchstones2015/" target="_new">The Mount</a>, Edith Wharton’s former estate in western Massachusetts. Darryl Pinckney, editor of the forthcoming LOA collection <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=432">James Baldwin: Later Novels</a></i>, joined journalist and critic <a href="https://twitter.com/katebolick" target="_new">Kate Bolick</a> for a talk on contemporary race relations and how Baldwin’s writings continue to resonate in twenty-first-century America. The conversation kicked off the latest season of “Touchstones at the Mount,” an ongoing series of author talks hosted by Bolick. <br />
<br />
By coincidence, <i>James Baldwin: Later Novels</i> will be published one week from today–on the same day as <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=431">Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s</a></i>, the fifth installment in The Library of America edition of Wharton’s collected works. <br />
<br />
In addition to editing the forthcoming Baldwin volume for The Library of America, Pinckney is the author of the novel <i>High Cotton</i> and the nonfiction works <i>Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature</i> and <i>Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy</i>. Bolick, a contributing editor for <i>The Atlantic</i>, is the author of <a href="http://www.katebolick.com/spinster/"><i>Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own</i></a>, a combination of memoir and cultural criticism that includes a lengthy consideration of Edith Wharton’s life and work.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxIAah0m7FJ8Y6TkUdYMXbbZ01UcBkw_qPakR7yTaSMC0hbFtnmQ1Z-EPv6uAw9fzTvg1nbyDvtjpwS4Th8rknc_-Bs65Q8H2dwyYeGVdaY6IBwupMJQTVeZJktV6-ltZONNdNB3QLi8j2/s1600/150922_pinckney_baldwin01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxIAah0m7FJ8Y6TkUdYMXbbZ01UcBkw_qPakR7yTaSMC0hbFtnmQ1Z-EPv6uAw9fzTvg1nbyDvtjpwS4Th8rknc_-Bs65Q8H2dwyYeGVdaY6IBwupMJQTVeZJktV6-ltZONNdNB3QLi8j2/s320/150922_pinckney_baldwin01.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Darryl Pinckney (holding <i>James Baldwin: Later Novels</i>)<br />
and Kate Bolick at The Mount <br />
in Lenox, Massachusetts on Sept. 17, 2015.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;"><b>Watch <i>Readers’ Almanac</i> in the weeks ahead for more on both <i>James Baldwin: Later Novels</i> and <i>Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s</i>.</b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;"><b>Photographs courtesy of The Mount.</b></span><br />
<br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/08/james-baldwin-resurgent-on-screen-and.html">James Baldwin, resurgent on screen and on the page in 2015</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2013/10/wendy-wasserstein-edith-wharton-desire.html">Wendy Wasserstein: Edith Wharton’s “desire to love & to look pretty”</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/01/is-edith-whartons-age-of-innocence.html">Is Edith Wharton’s <i>The Age of Innocence</i> the greatest novel about New York?</a></li>
</ul>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-45734348655639945932015-09-11T10:17:00.000-04:002015-09-11T10:17:27.796-04:00Women Crime Writers: Forty books, four pen names, and one enigmatic authorPublished last week, The Library of America’s two-volume collection <i>Women Crime Writers of the 1940s and 50s</i> has already won praise from the <i><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/women-crime-writers-review-well-known-and-unfairly-forgotten-favorites/2015/09/08/d474d29c-3f58-11e5-8d45-d815146f81fa_story.html" target="_new">Washington Post</a></i> and the <i><a href="http://www.charlotteobserver.com/entertainment/ent-columns-blogs/state-of-the-art/article34104030.html" target="_new">Charlotte Observer</a></i>, which says that the anthology “revives many a forgotten masterwork.” <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR6U1yPsQTpvu8BmhGtGbDqneB61MD6IGsacQEGKpIsM2y1yhSqGZdGMc9zBny8GYskYNdu0EfEU_4ljRVBdG6BA_I0ZMbywwCJOwaauSqfCjIojG_rX1ZteLze4jyulbOLiH8Al8koyHx/s1600/150911_dolores_hitchens.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR6U1yPsQTpvu8BmhGtGbDqneB61MD6IGsacQEGKpIsM2y1yhSqGZdGMc9zBny8GYskYNdu0EfEU_4ljRVBdG6BA_I0ZMbywwCJOwaauSqfCjIojG_rX1ZteLze4jyulbOLiH8Al8koyHx/s200/150911_dolores_hitchens.jpg" width="158" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Fools’ Gold</i> author<br />
Dolores Hitchens.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>“Forgotten masterwork” is a helpful capsule description of the last novel collected in the set, 1958’s <i>Fools’ Gold</i> by <b>Dolores Hitchens</b>, which had effectively fallen off the cultural radar despite having been made into the film <i>Band of Outsiders</i> by Jean-Luc Godard in 1964. Readers may be curious to know more about Hitchens (1907–1973) beyond what’s contained in The Library of America’s <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=74">biographical note</a>, which lists the more than forty titles she published under four different names in a career that spanned thirty-five years. <br />
<br />
So who was Dolores Hitchens, aka D. B. Olsen, aka Dolan Birkley, aka Noel Burke? <i>Women Crime Writers</i> editor Sarah Weinman has uncovered a 1952 letter from Hitchens to her editor at Doubleday, Isabelle Taylor, which explains at least one change of <i>nom de plume</i> and also serves as a witty miniature author bio. The letter originally saw the light of day in the privately published 1995 <i>Doubleday Crime Club Compendium 1928–1991</i>, edited by Ellen Nehr, and is here reprinted by permission of the Dolores Hitchens estate.<br />
<blockquote>It’s no secret that I am also D. B. Olsen. In fact I’m glad to get away from the Olsen name for a change (not having been married to Mr. Olsen for some twelve years now makes the necessity of continuing to be D. B. Olsen literally a bit irksome). The books I do under the Hitchens label are not the same type. It gives me a fresh lease on life. A new reincarnation, book-wise.<br />
<br />
The full name, and I’m <i>not</i> making this up as I go along, is Julia Clara Catherine Maria Dolores Robins Norton Birk Olsen Hitchens. The first five names have been whittled down to one—the only one I like. The five last names are accounted for by a series of step-fathers and two husbands.<br />
<br />
I always hated the name Julia and the pay-off came, at a graduation party at High School, when names were used in rhymes on the place-cards, and some would-be poet rhymed Julia with fool-ya. That was the moment when I became, once and for all, Dolores. Wouldn’t you?<br />
<br />
I’m taking psychology courses at the local college in my spare (joke) time with the ultimate aim of outfitting my characters with the latest in psychoses and fixations. Last time I wrote you we lived in Eureka but are now back in southern California on the outskirts of Long Beach in a district called Lakewood where the houses are laid overnight, like eggs. An estimated 3,500 people are moving in. We’re in an older district, however, and miss much of the excitement.</blockquote><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b><i>Fools’ Gold</i> by Dolores Hitchens is also available as a Library of America e-book and audiobook. <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=228">Click here</a> (scroll down) for more information on both formats.</b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>Visit the <i></i><i>Women Crime Writers</i> <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/">companion website</a> for complete information on all eight novels and their authors, along with appreciations by contemporary writers and related contextual material.</b></span><br />
<br />
<b>Related posts: </b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/08/sarah-weinman-women-crime-writers.html">Sarah Weinman: </a><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/08/sarah-weinman-women-crime-writers.html"><i>Women Crime Writers</i> anthology tells a new story about genre fiction </a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/listen-lost-suspense-masterwork-returns.html">Listen: Lost suspense masterwork returns to life in second Library of America audiobook</a></li>
</ul><br />
The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-33367879642797475522015-09-08T11:31:00.000-04:002015-09-09T15:09:18.895-04:00The long, hard-fought campaign that led to The Library of America’s founding<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnB7un6_ApsFMrL4dJaKDKNGGXOMCdkDskPpEnR1eRzcUB71Sqn7D0T15-eyqO4QC8gsj-gSgyQEgYAtyeLQMCICTIoxGXmqYCpnx4caiOp-j6yY8SFWsXZ15Z8PsClfMk3hNcOo-6fxT3/s1600/150908_humanities_septoct_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnB7un6_ApsFMrL4dJaKDKNGGXOMCdkDskPpEnR1eRzcUB71Sqn7D0T15-eyqO4QC8gsj-gSgyQEgYAtyeLQMCICTIoxGXmqYCpnx4caiOp-j6yY8SFWsXZ15Z8PsClfMk3hNcOo-6fxT3/s200/150908_humanities_septoct_blog.jpg" width="155" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Humanities</i>,<br />
September/October 2015</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>An origin story that is near and dear to us reached the public last week with the publication of “Edmund Wilson’s Big Idea,” a detailed history of The Library of America’s founding by David Skinner that appears in the September/October issue of <i>Humanities</i>, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and online at <a href="http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/septemberoctober/feature/edmund-wilsons-big-idea-series-books-devoted-classic-americ" target="_new">neh.gov</a>.<br />
<br />
Skinner’s intricate, inside-baseball account makes it clear that the LOA had a long gestation period, stretching across decades—which perhaps isn’t surprising for a nonprofit literary enterprise. What may grab readers’ attention, though, is how close the Library came to not happening at all.<br />
<br />
The original inspiration dates back to the 1950s, and to the critic Edmund Wilson, who had long complained of the lack of authoritative, readily available editions of seminal American authors. Wilson had in mind a U.S. equivalent to the French <a href="http://www.la-pleiade.fr/" target="_new">Bibliothèque de la Pléiade</a>: reference editions of the classics in an inexpensive format. While he was able to recruit influential allies for his venture, his efforts to secure the necessary funding never came to fruition, despite the founding of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965. After that, years of competing proposals and various forms of academic and institutional politics kept his dream from becoming reality until the late 1970s, well after Wilson himself passed away in 1972. And even then, as Skinner shows, launching the project was a close-fought battle.<br />
<br />
Skeptics argued that the proposed books would be too bulky. They would be too uncommercial—<i>or</i> they wouldn’t be scholarly enough. But years of tireless advocacy and shrewd politicking by the team who succeeded Wilson—“a rough synthesis of scholarship and New York City publishing brio,” in Skinner’s words—finally led to a Ford Foundation grant of $600,000 and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant of $1.2 million in early 1979. <br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio_QyU6qTw-VHcU-VFRD0eF-q5Erxxwy-9CNwKAzmUifNRH0uXJbP_CYYgZ9LoBUuGotDLoO7gM4mwEmAraGkUHQgnBGvdVtOVDmlBPxa4vbcf0Bl-AQXdesTXbMSDVxDpgGQQJx7rhOEH/s1600/150908_loa_founding_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio_QyU6qTw-VHcU-VFRD0eF-q5Erxxwy-9CNwKAzmUifNRH0uXJbP_CYYgZ9LoBUuGotDLoO7gM4mwEmAraGkUHQgnBGvdVtOVDmlBPxa4vbcf0Bl-AQXdesTXbMSDVxDpgGQQJx7rhOEH/s400/150908_loa_founding_blog.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">The Library of America's first print ad, May 1982.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
The rest, as they say, is literary history, and it would take an article at least as long as Skinner’s to do justice to the Library of America story since then. Its first four titles—collections of <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=101">Herman Melville</a>, <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=47">Nathaniel Hawthorne</a>, <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=76">Walt Whitman</a>, and <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=87">Harriet Beecher Stowe</a>—went on sale in early 1982, and years later Edmund Wilson himself entered the pantheon, via a two-volume set that amasses his essays and reviews from the <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=271">1920s</a> through <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=272">‘40s</a>. Perhaps the happiest note to conclude on is to mention that while in 1982 the first Library of America print ad [above] proudly predicted, “eventually the series will number more than one hundred volumes,” our upcoming <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/James-Baldwin-Novels-Library-America/dp/1598534548/" target="_new">James Baldwin: Later Novels</a></i>, publishing later this month, is number #272 in the series.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/septemberoctober/feature/edmund-wilsons-big-idea-series-books-devoted-classic-americ">Read “Edmund Wilson’s Big Idea” at neh.gov</a><br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 85%;">(Note: since its founding The Library of America has not received regular funding from any foundation or government agency. Instead, it relies on grants and charitable contributions every year to supplement its revenue from sales.)</span></b><br />
<br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2013/02/how-library-of-america-book-is-born.html">How a Library of America book is born</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2013/05/the-library-of-america-best-selling.html">The Library of America’s All-Time Best-Selling Titles</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/07/reading-richard-poirier-two-journals.html">Reading Richard Poirier: Two Journals Honor His Legacy</a></li>
</ul>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-27162284144052989942015-09-02T12:57:00.001-04:002015-09-16T18:15:06.645-04:00Alexandra Kleeman: Philip K. Dick’s “gnostic logic” and other influences on You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6SMFygDfoo21HAgvMSVzhaDvGVe1U4IWZIVrtA_Gp-cPQvtmDS066Jy-19dU9lObZFY66NZgB7_uP0W-eXdv784LQVHJpOTaMIM0zMUoUBvbhwkjyd1o9VNBRg5fAhjD2QOhYYTaCJKWp/s1600/YouTooCanHaveABody.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6SMFygDfoo21HAgvMSVzhaDvGVe1U4IWZIVrtA_Gp-cPQvtmDS066Jy-19dU9lObZFY66NZgB7_uP0W-eXdv784LQVHJpOTaMIM0zMUoUBvbhwkjyd1o9VNBRg5fAhjD2QOhYYTaCJKWp/s200/YouTooCanHaveABody.jpg" width="131" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>You Too Can Have a<br />
Body Like Mine</i> by<br />
Alexandra Kleeman<br />
(Harper, 2015)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Our series of guest posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a contribution from <b>Alexandra Kleeman</b>, whose just-published debut novel <a href="http://www.alexandrakleeman.com/books.html" target="_new"><i>You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine</i></a>, a seriocomic foray into consumerism and a uniquely contemporary kind of anomie, is drawing comparisons to DeLillo and Pynchon and, in the words of a <i><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/08/you_too_can_have_a_body_like_mine_by_alexandra_kleeman_reviewed.html" target="_new">Slate</a></i> reviewer, “may be our best novel about the weirdness of being female in a culture that is obsessed with women’s bodies.” Below, Kleeman shares some of her formative influences as a writer.<br />
<br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=305" target="_blank"><i>VALIS</i>, Philip K. Dick.</a></b> People often think of Dick as a bad writer with an amazing set of concepts he’s trying to convey, but it’s not until you try to perform a Dickian act of narrative inversion or reality-shifting that you see how much skill and craft goes into what can look superficially like clunky writing. <i>VALIS</i> aims to make the reader perceive distinct entities as existentially or spiritually unitary—beneath surface differences lies a gnostic equivalence. Hence <i>VALIS</i>’s unfortunately-named protagonist Horselover Fat (an etymological equivalent for Philip K. Dick’s own name) can have a friend named Phil Dick, and later discover that he and Phil Dick are one and the same person. It would be easier (though still somewhat impossible) to tell this story from the outside, narrating and explaining this discovery. But Dick embeds you in Horselover Fat’s consciousness, forcing you to experience the contradictions of this gnostic logic as a visceral assault on your own individuality. It’s one of the strangest and most mysterious books out there, and I think it’s more radical in its structure than Pynchon or DeLillo because Dick allows not just inconsistencies but full-blown paradoxes to crop up in his world. The reader becomes a site for the resolution of these unresolvables, the effect often being that you find yourself thinking an impossible thing that you’ve never thought before, or experiencing something that feels like it could tear you in half.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b><i>Letters to Wendy’s</i>, Joe Wenderoth.</b> This book takes the form a series of direct-address poems written on [the fast-food restaurant] Wendy’s comment cards—a uniquely modern constraint on composition if there ever was one. Shifting between exhortation, reflection, abuse, Wenderoth did a sort of postmodern take on “<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174503" target="_new">Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird</a>”—you could call it “500 Ways That Wendy’s Looks Back at You.” Lines like “People eating toward eternity! People looking nice toward eternity! It is terrible to be real, I know, but it is more terrible to be long” abut vivid descriptions of ground meat and factory farming. Wenderoth challenges the idea that the American lyric voice died with the obsolesce of the circumstances and landscapes that gave birth to it originally: in his poems there are pathos, tenderness, rage, and above all 100% real emotion, not from concentrate. I first read these when I was eighteen, and they rooted in me a belief that the unexceptional suburban places that surrounded me were not boring and sterile even though they were built to be—there was ample emotion, only that emotion was made wilder and stranger because it couldn’t find a place to settle itself.<i><br />
<br />
<b><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=173" target="_blank">The Member of the Wedding</a></b></i><b><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=173" target="_blank">, Carson McCullers.</a></b> A slew of books and movies out there aim to represent the transitional point at which the world stops engaging with you as a girl and begins engaging you, whether you like it or not, as a woman. None of them do it as well as Carson McCullers does. Frankie Addams is a twelve-year-old tomboy who “wishes that people could change back and forth from boys to girls”—we follow her over the course of a few days as she fantasizes about leaving town with her brother and his new bride, who are due to get married and then go on a honeymoon. By the end of the book, she’s narrowly escaped a disturbing encounter with a soldier and has learned what the reader knew all along: Her life is fixed insofar as her gender is fixed. She’ll learn to navigate the world with her newly sexualized body, she’ll learn unpleasant lessons about other people, she’ll age and if she does leave town it’s likely to be through a conventional, gendered channel rather than the escape she had imagined with her brother and his new wife, in a role she had dreamed up herself. This is a dark book, but funny, and true to a form of becoming a woman that I’ve known myself.</span><br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTwDI_hUEAXWViWP96pmvmVeciX0uO_QLqK5B2scEzLTTl95oRNEce1Y89ievoKET3nnVXiUBd2TsqNXn6rlOqWB1UIMbZzDaC54dQq1U_B_bQlJ3QXpMSZSNEZGWw-66GAm2rxs_AEgSu/s1600/150902_breakfast_vonnegut_tn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTwDI_hUEAXWViWP96pmvmVeciX0uO_QLqK5B2scEzLTTl95oRNEce1Y89ievoKET3nnVXiUBd2TsqNXn6rlOqWB1UIMbZzDaC54dQq1U_B_bQlJ3QXpMSZSNEZGWw-66GAm2rxs_AEgSu/s200/150902_breakfast_vonnegut_tn.jpg" width="132" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Breakfast of Champions</i><br />
by Kurt Vonnegut<br />
(Delacorte Press, 1973)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i><b><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=345" target="_blank">Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday</a></b></i><b><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=345" target="_blank">, Kurt Vonnegut.</a></b> Vonnegut is a good prescription for anyone who’s suffering from loneliness or sadness, which is why I read him in high school and why I consider him something like a personal friend to this day, even though obviously we never met. What he does so well in this book is depict people who are alone in their loneliness, together. Dwayne Hoover is a successful car salesman who’s on the brink of going insane and just looking for the right idea to fixate upon, Kilgore Trout is a published but more or less ignored author with a fictional premise that will end up driving Hoover mad. Threaded through their story are victims of racism and injustice, syphilitic microbes, cows and the hamburgers they are made into. From the perspective of narrator or reader, the sadness of each of these individual characters becomes visible as a sad but sympathetic web that connects us all invisibly. Even if the problems are terrible and unresolved, Vonnegut gives you a taste of what it’s like to empathize not just with individual others, but for the whole painful system.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b><i>Empathy</i>, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.</b> This is the poetry that I open up whenever I want to feel calmer and wiser, or like I am with a calm wise friend whose emotions absorb me while allowing me to be myself, separate. These are intricately detailed etchings of an internal landscape, or a seismograph registering the peak and fall of one single emotional thread. Everything in them is an analogue for feeling, or every feeling in them is an analogue for unadulterated space and air and light. I love this book too much.</span><br />
<blockquote><div class="hangingindent"><span style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 110%;">Though relations with oneself and with other people seem negotiated in terms secretly confirmed</span></div><div class="hangingindent"><span style="font-size: 80%; line-height: 110%;">by representation, her idea of the person’s visibility was not susceptible to representation. No matter</span></div><div class="hangingindent"><span style="font-size: 80%;">how emphatically a person will control his demeanor, there will be perspectives she cannot foresee or</span></div><div class="hangingindent"><span style="font-size: 80%;">direct, because there is no assignable end to the depth of us to which representation can reach,</span></div><div class="hangingindent"><span style="font-size: 80%;">the way part of a circle can be just the memory of a depth. The surface inside its contour,</span></div><div class="hangingindent"><span style="font-size: 80%;">like the inside of a body emits more feeling than its surroundings, as if</span></div><div class="hangingindent"><span style="font-size: 80%;">the volume or capacity of relations would only refer to something inside, that I can’t see,</span></div><div class="hangingindent"><span style="font-size: 80%;">that the other person and I keep getting in the way of, or things in the landscape while they are driving,</span></div><div class="hangingindent"><span style="font-size: 80%;">instead of the capacity being of your person. The volume of a bright cottonwood could be almost</span></div><div class="hangingindent"><span style="font-size: 80%;">a lack of volume or lack of space inside the tree, the way a membrane is the entrance of an organism.</span></div><span style="font-size: 80%;">—from “Honeymoon”</span></blockquote></blockquote>Alexandra Kleeman’s fiction has been published in <i>The Paris Review</i>, <i>Zoetrope: All-Story</i>, <i>Conjunctions</i>, <i>Guernica</i>, and <i>Gulf Coast</i>, among others, while her nonfiction has appeared in <i>Tin House</i>, <i>n+1</i>, and <i>The Guardian</i>. <i><a href="http://www.vogue.com/13295412/alexandra-kleeman-you-too-can-have-a-body-like-mine/" target="_new">Vogue</a></i> has praised <i>You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine</i> as “<i>Fight Club</i> for girls,” while the <i><a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-summer-reading-preview-20150604-story.html#" target="_new">Chicago Tribune</a></i> called it “a satirical and searing critique of modern-day womanhood.”<br />
<br />
<b>Previously in this series:</b><br />
“Influences” posts by <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/a-quintessential-black-literary-hero.html">Jabari Asim</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/deborah-baker-on-lafcadio-hearn-and.html">Deborah Baker</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/02/kate-christensen-on-swashbuckling.html">Kate Christensen</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/jennifer-gilmore-on-grace-paley-and-her.html">Jennifer Gilmore</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/lauren-groff-on-profound-generosity-of.html">Lauren Groff</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/lev-grossman-on-ernest-hemingway-verbal.html">Lev Grossman</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/10/jane-hirshfield-on-czesaw-miosz.html">Jane Hirschfield</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/alan-heathcock-on-james-salter-joy.html">Alan Heathcock</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/08/amitava-kumar-philip-roth-teaches-me-to.html">Amitava Kumar</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/01/adam-levin-american-literary-influences.html">Adam Levin</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/annie-liontas-influences-identity-and.html">Annie Liontas</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/09/dawn-mcguire-on-christian-wiman.html">Dawn McGuire</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/06/dinaw-mengestu-on-american-writers-who.html">Dinaw Mengestu</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/jim-moore-on-how-reading-kenneth.html">Jim Moore</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/05/nobody-knows-my-name-manuel-munoz-on.html">Manuel Muñoz</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/maggie-nelson-american-classics-that.html">Maggie Nelson</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/viet-thanh-nguyen-we-still-live-in.html">Viet Thanh Nguyen</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/08/house-of-walworth-gothic-literature.html">Geoffrey O’Brien</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/05/arthur-phillips-probes-seamless-circle.html">Arthur Phillips</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/12/carl-phillips-on-randall-jarrell-and.html">Carl Phillips</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/04/karen-russell-on-how-joy-williams.html">Karen Russell</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/07/timothy-schaffert-on-how-ambrose-bierce.html">Timothy Schaffert</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/01/philip-schultz-on-robert-longs-blue.html">Philip Schultz</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/mark-statman-on-how-kenneth-koch.html">Mark Statman</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/03/emma-straub-on-her-formative-influences.html">Emma Straub</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/j-courtney-sullivan-on-who-she-re-reads.html">J. Courtney Sullivan</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/ellen-ullman-on-her-dark-kinship-with.html">Ellen Ullman</a>, and <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/04/adam-wilson-on-being-bested-and.html">Adam Wilson</a>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-78346438420010732052015-09-01T13:27:00.001-04:002015-09-01T13:27:06.975-04:00Library of America launches fall season with a double-barreled blast of classic crime <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn55-yA_6rlG-xIUmJnDO5NgReXYcU5znMmZMgT-Tgg4QB04TiSUFBD-6RXG9wR3q49FpDiJCaclkH3IppERk-antF9AM12MN3QqWSd_jQEtmLIsodd7zqHPo72apdJKGTV9ajEjN_H1hyphenhyphen/s1600/150901_wcw_set_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn55-yA_6rlG-xIUmJnDO5NgReXYcU5znMmZMgT-Tgg4QB04TiSUFBD-6RXG9wR3q49FpDiJCaclkH3IppERk-antF9AM12MN3QqWSd_jQEtmLIsodd7zqHPo72apdJKGTV9ajEjN_H1hyphenhyphen/s200/150901_wcw_set_blog.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Women Crime Writers: Eight <br />
Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>September’s here—and though it’s not officially fall for three more weeks, today The Library of America’s fall season gets underway with a bang—the bang of a pistol shot, one might say, with the rollout of a veritable bonanza for fans of crime and suspense fiction. The two-volume anthology <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=430">Women Crime Writers of the 1940s and 50s</a></i> restores to print eight long-out-of-print or hard-to-find titles from the middle of the last century, while <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=427">Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1980s</a></i> collects four key works by an acknowledged master working at the height of his powers. <br />
<br />
Readers in the greater New York City area should know that an official launch event for <i>Women Crime Writers</i> will be held next <a href="http://links.loa.org/YesConnect/HtmlMessagePreview?a=tDEtQesGlV88A4GjcVu7uO" target="_new">Wednesday, September 9</a>, at The Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan. The anthology’s editor, crime fiction authority <b>Sarah Weinman</b>, will be joined by one of the genre’s leading contemporary practitioners, bestselling author <b>Megan Abbott</b>, for a talk on the role of women authors in the American crime/suspense canon. <br />
<br />
If you can’t make it to next Wednesday’s launch event, don't despair—Weinman will be discussing <i>Women Crime Writers</i> at bookstores around the country (and also in Toronto) this fall. <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=971">Click here</a> for her complete tour schedule. Curious readers are also directed to Weinman’s recent <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/08/sarah-weinman-women-crime-writers.html"><i>Reader’s Almanac</i> post</a> in which she discussed the collection’s origins, its significance for the genre, and what working on it has meant to her personally. Last but far from least, our <i>Women Crime Writers</i> <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/">mini-site</a> features extensive contextual information about the eight novels in the collection and their authors, along with appreciations by a range of contemporary talents in the field. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd-vnb4QlnvgNA2jG9eiS1p30tOyiISMPf-Uw1EBn9eSM-9tzeQ8x1PJK8GUDPM2lLRZOKGC3kmxOGP7Mp4D7veot5qbzO3gcgO1T5CE0iH7DnMlTiLeDBGo2Wv1zkZayw8iyblC4Ti0Ve/s1600/150901_leonard2_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd-vnb4QlnvgNA2jG9eiS1p30tOyiISMPf-Uw1EBn9eSM-9tzeQ8x1PJK8GUDPM2lLRZOKGC3kmxOGP7Mp4D7veot5qbzO3gcgO1T5CE0iH7DnMlTiLeDBGo2Wv1zkZayw8iyblC4Ti0Ve/s200/150901_leonard2_blog.jpg" width="123" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Elmore Leonard: <br />
Four Novels of the 1980s</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Jumping ahead a few decades, <i>Elmore Leonard: Four Novels of the 1980s</i>, the second volume in LOA’s Leonard edition, brings together four titles—<i>City Primeval</i>, <i>LaBrava</i>, <i>Glitz</i>, and <i>Freaky Deaky</i>—from the era in which Leonard became an above-ground phenomenon and, as Jeff Simon recently <a href="http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/editors-choice-early-and-late-works-by-elmore-leonard-20150628" target="_new">wrote</a> in <i>The Buffalo News</i>, “his mastery was a matter of widespread affirmation.” <br />
<br />
As an added enticement to fans, <i>Four Novels of the 1980s</i> also includes early drafts of passages from <i>City Primeval</i> and <i>LaBrava</i>, an account by editor Gregg Sutter of the research that went into all four books, and, perhaps most intriguingly, “Impressions of Murder,” a November 1978 <i>Detroit News Sunday Magazine</i> article in which Leonard relates his experiences shadowing Detroit homicide detectives. (“Impressions of Murder” subsequently provided the inspiration for 1980’s <i>City Primeval</i>.)<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: 85%;">Watch this space for more material related to the above titles, and for news of 2015 LOA titles still to come, which include late James Baldwin and Edith Wharton and a deluxe, diverse collection of writings by Frederick Law Olmsted.</span></b> <br />
<br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/08/sarah-weinman-women-crime-writers.html">Sarah Weinman: <i>Women Crime Writers</i> anthology tells a new story about genre fiction</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2014/09/lorenzo-carcaterra-remembers-how-elmore.html">Lorenzo Carcaterra remembers how Elmore Leonard “brought his characters close enough to life they could be touched”</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2014/08/an-interview-with-gregg-sutter-on.html">An interview with Gregg Sutter on Elmore Leonard’s “dialogue-driven crime novels with an emphasis on character”</a></li>
</ul>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-47985028198757149562015-08-25T11:20:00.002-04:002015-09-01T12:14:09.007-04:00Sarah Weinman: Women Crime Writers anthology tells a new story about genre fiction One week from today, The Library of America proudly publishes <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=430">Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s</a></i>, a two-volume collection of eight pioneering novels from the mid-twentieth century that are overdue for rediscovery. <b>Sarah Weinman</b>, widely recognized as an authority on crime fiction, edited the anthology; in the guest post below, she describes how the project came about, what it means for her personally, and its significance for our understanding of women writers in the American noir tradition.<br />
<blockquote><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipEajrtBpBhNdNCjzprEvbHZO8F0BdK2G2jkJ2C5M0qypGgxg4tdzNyeUKNzoM-r2WzPiIJ3Vr8CWyxySsD8UNjv95TSHwJObEQfA9FI0dGuLRx8qyfVsZcc1-ofhSWGnrhMh9IVQaehN4/s1600/150825_wcw_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipEajrtBpBhNdNCjzprEvbHZO8F0BdK2G2jkJ2C5M0qypGgxg4tdzNyeUKNzoM-r2WzPiIJ3Vr8CWyxySsD8UNjv95TSHwJObEQfA9FI0dGuLRx8qyfVsZcc1-ofhSWGnrhMh9IVQaehN4/s200/150825_wcw_blog.jpg" width="125" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Women Crime Writers:<br />
Eight Suspense Novels<br />
of the 1940s & 50s</i><br />
(Sept. 2015)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Several years ago, I looked at my bookshelves and realized that the most compelling and creative American crime fiction was being written and published by women. One need only look at recent best seller and awards lists to see example after example, from <i>Gone Girl</i> by Gillian Flynn to <i>The Fever</i> by Megan Abbott, <i>Coptown</i> by Karin Slaughter, and <i>Hush Hush</i> by Laura Lippman. They explore American society, the desires and anxieties of women, and the ways in which anyone could be capable of murder with a surgeon’s precision, a psychologist’s understanding, and hidden reserves of empathy.<br />
<br />
That got me to wonder: what of the women who preceded them? I started reading and researching and was floored by what I discovered: a rich trove of nerve-jangling suspense, thick with the fears and longings of women trapped in bad marriages, stuck between parents and children, who show steel and backbone in the most terrifying of circumstances. Here were stories borne out of and belonging to the post–World War II world, when women’s independent spirits, prized while fighting the enemy, were crushed by the return to traditional values. These stories, quite frankly, deserve to be recognized as the classics they are. (Much of that research led to <a href="http://domesticsuspense.com/" target="_blank"><i>Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives</i></a>, the domestic suspense fiction anthology I edited a few years ago.)<br />
<br />
Why weren’t these women getting their due? Why were their male counterparts, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Elmore Leonard, showered with accolades and acclaim, and they were not? It is my greatest pleasure, as editor of <i>Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s</i>, to introduce twenty-first-century readers to eight masters of the genre, part of a literary heritage they may not have realized existed or are eager to learn much more about.<br />
<br />
If you’ve seen the wonderful film noirs <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=84"><i>Laura</i></a> and <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=89"><i>In a Lonely Place</i></a>, prepare to be blown away by the original novels by Vera Caspary and Dorothy B. Hughes. After reading <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=91"><i>The Blank Wall</i></a> by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, you may wonder how far you’d go to protect your daughter from murderous ruin. And you’ll never look at a college campus in quite the same way once you’ve read <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=87"><i>The Horizontal Man</i></a>, the Edgar Award–winning novel by Helen Eustis.<br />
<br />
As for our choices from the 1950s, two of the mystery genre’s greatest practitioners, Charlotte Armstrong and Margaret Millar, present graduate-level clinics in madness and suspense with <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=93"><i>Mischief</i></a> and <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=97"><i>Beast in View</i></a>. Patricia Highsmith's <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=95"><i>The Blunderer</i></a> is not only a major novel but an important precursor to her quintet of Ripley novels. Finally, we’re proud to introduce a new generation to Dolores Hitchens with <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=99"><i>Fools’ Gold</i></a>, a tale of delinquent teens and a heist gone very, very wrong.<br />
<br />
<i>Women Crime Writers</i> tells a story about crime fiction you may not have been aware of before. But it’s a story that needs to be told, and I am honored to be part of the telling.</blockquote><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVdY3kY5EP4ytn5iTe5xnHSezpLhJWakkFAZMcCmJnvzJ7Gk3SshkdSen7I03SzKhjNjonIi0Qe_MP-yE4cgY-w-VhfsVmNxt1t-kv0GRVnd4oOEVlJuGgZcMgllF7Rtx71EjYkDaSxYX9/s1600/SWbyMichaelLionstar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Sarah Weinman" border="0" height="120" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVdY3kY5EP4ytn5iTe5xnHSezpLhJWakkFAZMcCmJnvzJ7Gk3SshkdSen7I03SzKhjNjonIi0Qe_MP-yE4cgY-w-VhfsVmNxt1t-kv0GRVnd4oOEVlJuGgZcMgllF7Rtx71EjYkDaSxYX9/s200/SWbyMichaelLionstar.jpg" title="" width="120" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Sarah Weinman<br />
(© Michael Lionstar)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Sarah Weinman is the editor of <i>Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense</i>, which the <i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i> called “simply one of the most significant anthologies of crime fiction, ever.” She is the news editor for <i>Publishers Marketplace</i>, and her work has appeared in <i>The New York Times</i>, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, the <i>National Post</i>, and <i>The Washington Post</i>, among other publications. <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=971">Click here</a> for her <i>Women Crime Writers</i> book tour schedule.<br />
<br />
<b>Visit the special <i>Women Crime Writers</i> <a href="http://womencrime.loa.org/">companion website</a> for complete information on the eight novels and their authors, along with appreciations by contemporary writers and a wealth of contextual material.</b> <br />
<br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/listen-lost-suspense-masterwork-returns.html">Listen: Lost suspense masterwork returns to life in second Library of America audiobook</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/orange-is-new-black-star-is-voice.html"><i>Orange Is the New Black</i> star is the voice behind first Library of America audiobook</a></li>
</ul>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-28856438642978083832015-08-24T11:02:00.001-04:002015-08-24T11:02:58.172-04:00Gordon S. Wood: How the American Revolution “infused into our culture our noblest ideals and highest aspirations”<span style="color: #660000;">In the summer of 1765, anti-tax riots roiled Great Britain’s North American colonies from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Charleston, South Carolina, the first stirrings of what became the American Revolution. This month, for the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act Crisis, The Library of America is publishing </span><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=426"><span style="color: navy;"><i>The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764–1776</i></span></a><span style="color: #660000;">, a two-volume collection that captures the extraordinary political debate which led, in just twelve short years, to the Declaration of Independence and the end of the first British empire.</span><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo0ziBE529fucKQWaezceopHN-rDsyJ_6Dq0qCt0p19Tj3IfdwHyC5PCfww6H3CCWJTW5IqrfgM79YV3rCt3JEgR4m2C73e-KiKbqYzIAYNb8RjihQuNqy7GRKt6oNa21tWWB-CJTSmF0q/s1600/Wood.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo0ziBE529fucKQWaezceopHN-rDsyJ_6Dq0qCt0p19Tj3IfdwHyC5PCfww6H3CCWJTW5IqrfgM79YV3rCt3JEgR4m2C73e-KiKbqYzIAYNb8RjihQuNqy7GRKt6oNa21tWWB-CJTSmF0q/s200/Wood.gif" /></a><span style="color: #660000;">We recently interviewed acclaimed historian Gordon S. Wood, who edited the collection. Wood is Alva O. Way Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University and his books include the Pulitzer Prize–winning <i>The Radicalism of the American Revolution</i> and the Bancroft Prize–winning <i>The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787</i>. In 2011 Wood was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>The new Library of America set collects thirty-nine of the more than one thousand pamphlets that appeared between 1764 and 1776. What were your main criteria for the selections you finally settled on?</i></span> <br />
<br />
The key criterion was the importance of the pamphlet in advancing the debate. The goal in assembling this collection was to provide readers with a clear sense of how the polemical contest over the relationship between the British government and the colonies emerged and escalated until the final rupture in 1776. To do this, it was essential to include pamphlets published in England as well as in America, because they often spoke directly to one another.<br />
<br />
It is one of the ironies of the American Revolution that the colonies had closer ties to the mother country in this period than they had ever had before, and this is nowhere more evident than in the pamphlet debate. These texts were part of a lively transatlantic discourse in which pamphlets published in Boston or Philadelphia soon appeared in London and were quickly reprinted, and vice versa. Distinguishing these writers as “British” and “American” can be tricky, too. Englishman Thomas Paine had been resident in the colonies for only fourteen months when he wrote <i>Common Sense</i>, the most influential expression of the “American” position, while Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who in two pamphlets gathered here presents the “British” position as forcefully as any writer, had deep ancestral roots in the Bay Colony. Finally, I took into account the historical significance of the authors. For some writers, like Thomas Jefferson, the pamphlet debate marked their emergence on the scene; for others like Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke, it afforded an opportunity to display their unique rhetorical gifts.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: navy;"><i>For a general reader, one of the discoveries here is a nuanced debate about “virtual” versus “actual” representation that sows the seeds for what became the American Revolution. What made that debate so important for later events in our history—and did it have consequences for Great Britain’s political development as well?</i></span><br />
<br />
The pamphlet debate revealed the extent to which American ideas about representation had diverged from British. Because of the manifest impracticality of the colonies sending representatives to Parliament, defenders of parliamentary authority over the colonies were forced to clarify as never before the idea of virtual representation, which held that Parliament represents the interests of the empire regardless of how or from where its members were selected. This became the primary philosophical difference that animated the controversy. Americans going back to the colonial period have always thought of the electoral process as the principal criterion of representation, and we have generally believed that representation has to be in proportion to population. That is why we have usually placed great importance on expanding suffrage and on bringing electoral districts into some kind of rational relationship to population. To underscore the link between the representative and the represented, we have also required that elected officials be residents of their specific districts. Conversely, even today, such a residency requirement does not exist for British MPs.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnwdvDzvamNkZAJaiNBvqG_sas-ATzOEjkSm1M0mLGFRQ_sDr7COlvmT8dnn_7lXlD91Pc-NGOfyNYjlTz_TiSwt5PGirmLPLudrpcHWDWjnC_glDoDLKMzQLo94XK_S6YB81vyWAZiWzv/s1600/81sZ1wuv64L.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764–1776" border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnwdvDzvamNkZAJaiNBvqG_sas-ATzOEjkSm1M0mLGFRQ_sDr7COlvmT8dnn_7lXlD91Pc-NGOfyNYjlTz_TiSwt5PGirmLPLudrpcHWDWjnC_glDoDLKMzQLo94XK_S6YB81vyWAZiWzv/s200/81sZ1wuv64L.jpg" title="" width="131" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>The American Revolution:<br />
Writings from the<br />
Pamphlet Debate<br />
1764–1776</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="color: #000066;"><i>Much of the debate turns on the history of the founding of the American colonies and of the long period during which the mother country’s imperial policy, as Edmund Burke famously characterized it in a pamphlet included in this collection, seemed to amount to “salutary neglect.” What did American writers who were arguing against parliamentary authority hope to gain by this resort to history? How did their opponents counter their claims?</i></span><br />
<br />
History was always important to Englishmen in establishing rights. The common law is very much a history-based legal structure, so it was natural for the colonists to appeal to history, Magna Charta, the English Bill of Rights, and other important legal precedents to support their claims. Several American writers, particularly Edward Bancroft, the future British spy, turned to the seventeenth century, and the reign of the Stuarts, to make fascinating arguments about the nature of the relationship between the king and the parliament, and the underlying rationale for colonization in the first place. Their opponents likewise appealed to history, but their source material was much more recent, really only including the decades of the eighteenth century when parliamentary sovereignty developed. Because of the importance of historical references in the debate, the Library of America collection includes a 32-page chronology charting the history of the English and later British empire from its founding to 1776, when its greatest jewel was lost.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>Contemporary readers may be surprised to find, among the British writers represented here, that Samuel Johnson is one of the most vociferous critics of the American position while Edmund Burke is one of the most conciliatory. What do we know about the motivations behind their respective positions?</i></span><br />
<br />
Johnson, the older of the two, was always Toryish in his outlook and he never liked America. When he toured the Hebrides with Boswell he was stunned by the vacant villages in Scotland. He thought that Britain was becoming depopulated by the massive emigration of Brits to America in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. One gets the sense that when the British government came to him to enlist his pen in their defense in the pamphlet debate, he didn’t need much coaxing. Burke on the other hand was a fervent Whig, and as such opposed to Crown power. Since the empire had traditionally been viewed as under the king’s control, he and his party of Rockingham Whigs were suspicious of what George III was up to in the 1760s. At the same time the Rockingham Whigs were devoted to parliamentary sovereignty and thus could never be outright advocates of the American position. This left Burke in the position of urging the British government to, in effect, let sleeping dogs lie. He foresaw that by exposing certain fundamental differences in political theory between the British and the Americans, the government’s policies could only end in disaster.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>Johnson’s pamphlet contains the unforgettable line “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Did anyone writing for the American side have a rejoinder to that—and does slavery figure anywhere else in the pamphlet debate?</i></span><br />
<br />
Slavery was always a latent issue for many in the debate, but by today’s standards what is amazing is how little it was raised, especially since the colonists talked constantly of being “enslaved” by the British policies. Many took African slavery for granted as the lowest form of dependency in a hierarchy of dependencies, and used the imagery without any sense of the inherent hypocrisy. But others like James Otis did see the inconsistency and spoke out against slavery, as when he memorably wrote: “The colonists are by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black. . . . Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black?”<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>It’s interesting that two of the most prominent “patriot” writers in the first volume of this collection, Daniel Dulany and John Dickinson, later had qualms about independence—Dulany becoming a Loyalist and Dickinson leading the opposition to the Declaration in Congress in 1776. What accounts for this apparent change of heart?</i></span><br />
<br />
In the 1760s many colonists were opposed to the new British policies, but certainly did not anticipate breaking up the empire. All of them had a respect for English traditions of law and rights. In the end most of them revolted not against the English constitution but on behalf of it, in what they often characterized as a conservative attempt to retain their traditional rights. Dulany was a member of the council in Maryland and had a vested interest in the empire. Dickinson sincerely believed that America’s breaking free of England would lead to America’s bleeding from every vein. England after all was the bastion of liberty in a hostile world.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKlzYIGUjli_cEsNnyb16TQz-n68QAzxSUiH387kzs_uDQr5nzRSdnN6A2PFEHLijbCZZJdVR6H2inGLGTCMIkNxZdGdBRy65cw16SkYtaIfq2LU7CUppGUNxLiELfjea9Wb7NdAdRV-Qk/s1600/150824_common_sense.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKlzYIGUjli_cEsNnyb16TQz-n68QAzxSUiH387kzs_uDQr5nzRSdnN6A2PFEHLijbCZZJdVR6H2inGLGTCMIkNxZdGdBRy65cw16SkYtaIfq2LU7CUppGUNxLiELfjea9Wb7NdAdRV-Qk/s200/150824_common_sense.jpg" width="115" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Title page of<br />
<i>Common Sense</i> (1776)<br />
by Thomas Paine</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="color: #000066;"><i>How would you describe the role that Thomas Paine’s </i>Common Sense<i> plays in the debate? Does his famous pamphlet seem more or less revolutionary when viewed in this context?</i></span><br />
<br />
Paine’s pamphlet really was different, and its extraordinary character only becomes clearer when seen in the context of this collection. Most of the other writers in the pamphlet debate were elites, with positions of authority in society. Paine was different. He was our first public intellectual, and unlike the other pamphleteers, he lived solely by his pen. As such, he aimed at a much broader audience than did the others, one encompassing the middling class of artisans, tradesmen, and tavern-goers. Unlike the elite writers who bolstered their arguments with legal citations and references to the whole of Western culture going back to the ancients, Paine did not expect his readers to know more than the Bible and the English Book of Common Prayer. Everyone knew that Paine was violating the conventional rules of rhetoric and were awed by his pamphlet. More substantively, Paine’s aggressive anti-royalism marked a major turn in the debate. Recognizing the need to shock his readers out of their reflexive loyalty to the Crown, Paine employed a pungent style unlike any other, referring to George III as “the Royal Brute.”<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>New histories of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers appear with ever greater frequency. Why do you feel it is important for readers to return to the original writings of the era?</i></span><br />
<br />
The Revolution is the most important event in our history. It not only legally created the United States but it infused into our culture our noblest ideals and highest aspirations, our beliefs in liberty, equality, and the happiness of ordinary people. Since there is no American ethnicity, these ideals and values are the only thing holding us together as a nation. As valuable as secondary works about the period are, or can be, it’s essential that we continually go back to the original writings of the Founders for nourishment and renewal of what it means to be an American.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-VE4pcKgiTN8-NWQLGWMY-67j6moVDFWuar1XQj29i-tXspbDPvkvfqvWb-EOndJhV-rCjLGOxinMNAA-sUq14wUgYWHiuj2kfrPurtXVPrH7kQP-gwNCDArupDVjmA4IJ5IeMOKs7NgC/s1600/41IC0lRWmaL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-VE4pcKgiTN8-NWQLGWMY-67j6moVDFWuar1XQj29i-tXspbDPvkvfqvWb-EOndJhV-rCjLGOxinMNAA-sUq14wUgYWHiuj2kfrPurtXVPrH7kQP-gwNCDArupDVjmA4IJ5IeMOKs7NgC/s200/41IC0lRWmaL.jpg" width="121" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>John Adams:<br />
Writings from the<br />
New Nation 1784-1826</i><br />
(March 2016)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="color: #000066;"><i>These are the third and fourth volumes you’ve edited for The Library of America, joining your two-volume edition </i>John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1755–1783<i>, published in 2011. And a third and final volume of Adams’s writings is forthcoming in the spring. What is it about The Library of America that keeps you coming back? </i></span><br />
<br />
The Library of America is a non-profit cultural institution that is dedicated to preserving America’s literary heritage. It makes the great works of American writings available to the general reader in modestly priced editions; at the same time, Library of America editions provide enough editorial apparatus to be useful to students and scholars. One certainly doesn’t engage in these editorial projects for the money, but rather for the opportunity to make some great writings available to future generations. For the editors, they have to be projects of love, as this one was for me.The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-3992538677371457952015-08-14T13:50:00.000-04:002015-08-25T09:35:42.080-04:00James Baldwin, resurgent on screen and on the page in 2015Library of America fans in the greater New York City area will want to know that the Film Society of Lincoln Center has just announced a comprehensive four-day <a href="http://www.filmlinc.org/daily/gloria-grahame-james-baldwin-series-announced-for-september/" target="_blank">film series</a> dedicated to <b>James Baldwin</b>. “The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on Film” runs from September 11 through 14 and will include compilations of Baldwin’s TV appearances as well as documentaries about him and in which he appeared, including a remastered edition of <i>James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket</i>, Karen Thorsen’s much-lauded biographical portrait from 1989. <br />
<br />
Baldwin fans will of course recognize the series’ title as a nod to <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=121">The Devil Finds Work</a></i>, his book-length 1976 meditation on American cinema and the myriad ways it shapes and embodies national attitudes on race. In tribute to that book, the Film Society will screen Ingmar Bergman’s <i>Sawdust and Tinsel</i>, for which he expressed great admiration in his 1960 essay on Bergman, as well as Stanley Kramer’s <i>The Defiant Ones</i>, the subject of some of Baldwin’s most withering commentary.<br />
<br />
The Film Society’s retrospective arrives at a moment when Baldwin, who died in 1987, suddenly seems an all but ubiquitous presence in American cultural life. Readers can judge for themselves the extent to which current events in the U.S. confirm the enduring relevance of Baldwin’s critiques, but it’s clear the publication earlier this summer of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s <i>Between the World and Me</i> has prompted a renewed interest in his work. (A blurb from Toni Morrison on the jacket of <i>Between the World and Me</i> names Coates as Baldwin’s intellectual heir.) The Library of America itself, for instance, has recently seen a dramatic spike in sales of its edition of Baldwin’s <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=121">Collected Essays</a></i>. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh23pCPEiEW007y62vZsnemvX-zh4e7as_5viWhFnokCTB9hvUDp2Bz5derJty_UwLnvDuYHpAch3IkCkJ8mdAvK6w6wkJMinzyx57mbciLpWTifatzObwnq7Epi4zCHYNrb3JeeRuRHGZs/s1600/150814_baldwin3_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh23pCPEiEW007y62vZsnemvX-zh4e7as_5viWhFnokCTB9hvUDp2Bz5derJty_UwLnvDuYHpAch3IkCkJ8mdAvK6w6wkJMinzyx57mbciLpWTifatzObwnq7Epi4zCHYNrb3JeeRuRHGZs/s200/150814_baldwin3_blog.jpg" width="122" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>James Baldwin:<br />
Later Novels</i><br />
(September 2015)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Two weeks after the Film Society series, LOA makes another contribution to the Baldwin resurgence with the publication of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1598534548/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_leHZvb0DFPFT7" target="_blank"><i>James Baldwin: Later Novels</i></a>, which collects three titles from the late ’60s and ’70s—<i>Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone</i>, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i>, and <i>Just Above My Head</i>—that are overdue for reassessment by critics and general readers alike. If these books can be granted the kind of consideration that has long been given to earlier Baldwin novels like <i>Go Tell It on the Mountain</i>—and with the larger culture clearly more ready to engage with Baldwin’s explorations of sexual identity than it was in decades past—then it seems safe to assert that Baldwin isn’t so much enjoying a cultural “moment” as he is assuming his rightful position as one of the central American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;"><b>The complete screening schedule for The Film Society of Lincoln Center series "The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on Film" is available at <a href="http://www.filmlinc.org/daily/gloria-grahame-james-baldwin-series-announced-for-september/" target="_blank">filmlinc.com</a>. The Library of America publishes <i>James Baldwin: Later Novels</i> on September 29, 2015.</b></span> <br />
<b><br />
Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/01/james-baldwin-on-hearing-martin-luther.html">James Baldwin on hearing Martin Luther King preach in Montgomery</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/02/on-toni-morrison-80th-birthday.html">On Toni Morrison’s 80th birthday: Remembering her friendship with James Baldwin</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/08/james-baldwin-sentences-like-no-one.html">James Baldwin: Sentences like no one else</a></li>
</ul>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-66628677190011279342015-08-13T15:43:00.001-04:002015-08-13T15:43:32.698-04:00Forthcoming from The Library of America (Winter–Spring 2016)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihyRd1NeiGV2VkZlp2MQHxonXzSq7Cy33MS-eh_Tc09LM7JvDWuLzY9NWYL7nqn2YRJOq19JErOmuoSn-OVhNq1pIFz6c1ZXFvgWcJ1OGugKhedOphgnRfo015HjL5Z9gKhQG7jSQ7MGg2/s1600/140813_abigail_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihyRd1NeiGV2VkZlp2MQHxonXzSq7Cy33MS-eh_Tc09LM7JvDWuLzY9NWYL7nqn2YRJOq19JErOmuoSn-OVhNq1pIFz6c1ZXFvgWcJ1OGugKhedOphgnRfo015HjL5Z9gKhQG7jSQ7MGg2/s200/140813_abigail_blog.jpg" width="121" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 75%;"><i>Abigail Adams: Letters</i><br />
(forthcoming March 2016)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>The Library of America series ushers in 2016 with a slate of familiar names alongside one notable newcomer. <i>Henry James: Autobiographies</i> is the sixteenth volume in the LOA edition of James’s collected works, its publication timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of his death on February 28, 1916. Ross Macdonald and Virgil Thomson also return, and we conclude our Kurt Vonnegut edition with <i>Novels 1987–1997</i>, which collects three satirical novels from the twilight years of the American century. <br />
<br />
With <i>Abigail Adams: Letters</i>, America’s second First Lady becomes the first woman from the founding era to have a Library of America volume devoted entirely to her writings. That book will appear in tandem with the third and final collection of her husband John Adams’s writings. <br />
<br />
Two paperback reprints, <i>Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now</i> and <i>Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber</i>, round out our winter–spring list.<br />
<br />
<b>LIBRARY OF AMERICA SERIES</b><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><b>Kurt Vonnegut</b><br />
<i>Novels 1987–1997</i></span><br />
Sidney Offit, Editor<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;"><i><b>Bluebeard • Hocus Pocus • Timequake</b></i><br />
January 2016<br />
Library of America #273 / ISBN 978-1-59853-464-1</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><b>Henry James</b><br />
<i>Autobiographies</i></span><br />
Philip Horne, Editor<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;"><i><b>A Small Boy and Others • Notes of a Son and Brother • The Middle Years • Other Writings</b></i><br />
February 2016 <br />
Library of America #274 / ISBN 978-1-59853-471-9</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><b>Abigail Adams</b><br />
<i>Letters</i></span><br />
Edith Gelles, Editor<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">March 2016 <br />
Library of America #275 / ISBN 978-159853-465-8</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><b>John Adams</b><br />
<i>Writings from the New Nation 1784–1826</i></span><br />
Gordon S. Wood, Editor<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">March 2016 <br />
Library of America #276 / ISBN 978-159853-466-5</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><b>Virgil Thomson</b><br />
<i>The State of Music & Other Writings</i></span><br />
Tim Page, Editor<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;"><i><b>The State of Music • Virgil Thomson • American Music Since 1910 • Music with Words • Other Writings</b></i><br />
March 2016 <br />
Library of America #277 / ISBN 978-159853-467-2</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><b>Ross Macdonald</b><br />
<i>Three Novels of the Early 1960s</i></span><br />
Tom Nolan, Editor<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;"><i><b>The Zebra-Striped Hearse • The Chill • The Far Side of the Dollar</b></i><br />
April 2016<br />
Library of America #279 / ISBN 978-159853-479-5</span><br />
<br />
<b>NEW PAPERBACKS</b><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><b><i>Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now</i></b></span><br />
James Shapiro, editor<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">January 2016<br />
ISBN 978-159853-462-7</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><b>Manny Farber</b><br />
<i>Farber on Film</i></span><br />
Robert Polito, Editor<br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;">February 2016 <br />
ISBN 978-159853-469-6</span><br />
<br />
<b>Previously on Reader’s Almanac</b><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/03/forthcoming-from-library-of-america.html">Forthcoming from The Library of America (Fall 2015)</a>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-70434369340158909152015-08-10T11:38:00.001-04:002015-08-10T11:38:55.216-04:00Amitava Kumar: Philip Roth teaches me to be a bit more honest<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lunch-Bigot-Writer-Amitava-Kumar/dp/0822359308/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alt="Lunch with a Bigot by Amitava Kumar" border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_hTA7CqsZp5zhm4hfhhEvtYIcDyXOLqfEDzMhal9I7oCytam9C0rSBpP0vJopHcCOt7HTbx4PJ4Erc4bPg89EkabC3BtSuk6M8skesItz8UVoc9hX6raJ6tqBNeth_L8DJGikC7Za3SjI/s200/kumar_lunch_bigot.jpg" title="" width="133" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Lunch with a Bigot</i> by<br />
Amitava Kumar<br />
(Duke University Press, 2015)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Our series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, poetry, essays, and history continues today with a contribution by <b>Amitava Kumar</b>, whose new collection <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/lunch-with-a-bigot" target="_blank"><i>Lunch with a Bigot: The Writer in the World</i></a> (Duke University Press, 2015) encompasses memoir, reportage, and criticism. Below, Kumar expresses his admiration for Philip Roth's ability to combine detailed observation with “the voluble, expressive sharing of rage, and sorrow, and befuddled despair.”<br />
<blockquote>On the right side of my writing desk in my study is a black wooden bookshelf with thick, box-like sections where I keep books I need for my current projects. But on the wall in front, the wall that I face while I write, is a bookshelf on which are kept the books I know I will return to regularly. Those are the books that have made me who I am: they hold the key to the kind of writer I want to become. These titles are my personal classics. On the top of the shelf there is a boxed set of <i>Paris Review</i> interviews and the framed photographs of my two children, and below them, in the first row, a line of hardbound books in their white cardboard cases. These are the Library of America editions of Philip Roth’s writings. <br />
<br />
I must have already read three or four novels of Roth’s before he became central to my thinking. Why did this happen? Perhaps the change occurred one night in Delhi. I was in my late thirties. By then I had published books of criticism, reportage, and a literary memoir. During a visit to India, the country of my birth, a young writer I admired took down Roth’s <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=349"><i>American Pastoral</i></a> from his crowded bookshelf. We were sitting on the floor in his living room, drinking rum and coke. This writer is a man of unusual sensitivity and, although he downplays this part in conversation, he is a powerful editor of a national newspaper. He also stammers. From the page he had opened in <i>American Pastoral</i>, my friend began to read a passage which ended with the following words: “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.”<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWCfy3hG7Jb1hfirMXngEitf4p6B4nuSX2uba7bjpzZXwX_Syk-Pyz-srGm7n9c41jvNbqJviBfq4pBTCjMC76n5AeQdQHqsFoZinRaDuzz_eS5fcFFoT7drG3hllRBqPlpIoiKemmWsPS/s1600/roth_american_pastoral.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWCfy3hG7Jb1hfirMXngEitf4p6B4nuSX2uba7bjpzZXwX_Syk-Pyz-srGm7n9c41jvNbqJviBfq4pBTCjMC76n5AeQdQHqsFoZinRaDuzz_eS5fcFFoT7drG3hllRBqPlpIoiKemmWsPS/s200/roth_american_pastoral.jpg" width="132" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>American Pastoral</i><br />
by Philip Roth<br />
(Houghton Mifflin, 1997)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>I remember asking my friend to read the entire page again and, for my sake, he did so with many pauses. When I came back to the U.S., I bought a paperback copy of the novel. The lines that had been read to me in Delhi appear early in <i>American Pastoral</i> and what they catch quite effectively is a kind of shocked bewilderment in the face of angry social change. I’m talking now of the late 1960s in America. Roth’s novel is about the unsettling of middle-class notions of success and stability. But the above passage also presents a literary credo. Its essence was captured by Grace Paley when she argued that the writer, in contrast to the critic, writes not out of expertise but out of bafflement and urgent, unfailing interest. In an essay called “The Value of Not Understanding Everything,” Paley distinguished criticism from literature with disarming lucidity: “What I’m saying is that in areas in which you are very smart you might try writing history or criticism, and then you can know and tell how all the mystery of America flows out from under Huck Finn’s raft; where you are kind of dumb, write a story or novel, depending on the depth and breath of your dumbness.”<br />
<br />
I like Roth for his monumental dumbness. His lack of understanding of the mystery that is his life—this also explains why he sometimes seems to be writing the same book again and again—is interesting because it is paired with a particularly male, even arrogant, set of certainties. The struggle for understanding is examined with great frankness. Roth generates enormous energy in <i>American Pastoral</i> by putting beside the voluble, expressive sharing of rage, and sorrow, and befuddled despair, an impressive array of precise observations. Think, for instance, of the detailed description of glove-making in Newark. <br />
<br />
It’s not just that Roth’s characters can be so completely sure, and then so incredibly filled with doubt. Very few writers are capable of showing how they get things wrong, how they get <i>themselves</i> wrong. But let me make this argument by using Roth’s own words. Here is an anarchic poet named Ralph Baumgarten talking to Roth’s narrator, David Kepesh, in the novel <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=247"><i>The Professor of Desire</i></a>: “For me the books count—my own included—where the writer incriminates <i>himself</i>. Otherwise, why bother? To incriminate the other guy? Best leave that to our betters, don’t you think. . . .”<br />
<br />
English departments in this country are full of our betters. Roth teaches me to be a bit more honest.</blockquote>Writer and journalist Amitava Kumar is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College and a contributing editor at <i><a href="https://www.guernicamag.com/" target="_blank">Guernica</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.caravanmagazine.in/" target="_blank">Caravan</a></i>. The author of several books of nonfiction and one novel, he sits on the board of the Asian American Writers Workshop and was recently awarded a residency at Yaddo. Geoff Dyer praised <i>Lunch with a Bigot</i> as “stimulating, wide-ranging, learned, and funny—exactly what one wants from a book of essays,” and Edmund White has called Kumar “a sensitive, probing, erudite writer, always ready to question others and himself.”<br />
<br />
<b>Previously in this series:</b><br />
“Influences” posts by <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/a-quintessential-black-literary-hero.html">Jabari Asim</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/deborah-baker-on-lafcadio-hearn-and.html">Deborah Baker</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/02/kate-christensen-on-swashbuckling.html">Kate Christensen</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/jennifer-gilmore-on-grace-paley-and-her.html">Jennifer Gilmore</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/lauren-groff-on-profound-generosity-of.html">Lauren Groff</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/lev-grossman-on-ernest-hemingway-verbal.html">Lev Grossman</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/10/jane-hirshfield-on-czesaw-miosz.html">Jane Hirschfield</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/alan-heathcock-on-james-salter-joy.html">Alan Heathcock</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/01/adam-levin-american-literary-influences.html">Adam Levin</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/annie-liontas-influences-identity-and.html">Annie Liontas</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/09/dawn-mcguire-on-christian-wiman.html">Dawn McGuire</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/06/dinaw-mengestu-on-american-writers-who.html">Dinaw Mengestu</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/jim-moore-on-how-reading-kenneth.html">Jim Moore</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/05/nobody-knows-my-name-manuel-munoz-on.html">Manuel Muñoz</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/maggie-nelson-american-classics-that.html">Maggie Nelson</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/viet-thanh-nguyen-we-still-live-in.html">Viet Thanh Nguyen</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/08/house-of-walworth-gothic-literature.html">Geoffrey O’Brien</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/05/arthur-phillips-probes-seamless-circle.html">Arthur Phillips</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/12/carl-phillips-on-randall-jarrell-and.html">Carl Phillips</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/04/karen-russell-on-how-joy-williams.html">Karen Russell</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/07/timothy-schaffert-on-how-ambrose-bierce.html">Timothy Schaffert</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/01/philip-schultz-on-robert-longs-blue.html">Philip Schultz</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/mark-statman-on-how-kenneth-koch.html">Mark Statman</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/03/emma-straub-on-her-formative-influences.html">Emma Straub</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/j-courtney-sullivan-on-who-she-re-reads.html">J. Courtney Sullivan</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/ellen-ullman-on-her-dark-kinship-with.html">Ellen Ullman</a>, and <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/04/adam-wilson-on-being-bested-and.html">Adam Wilson</a>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-58454398730776029732015-08-06T12:52:00.002-04:002015-08-06T13:05:21.126-04:00Video: Talented New York trio finds the music in Jack Kerouac’s poetry and proseIn honor of The Library of America’s just-published <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=418">third volume</a> of Jack Kerouac’s writings, and on the heels of our <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/08/an-interview-with-todd-tietchen-took.html">interview</a> earlier this week with that book’s editor, Todd Tietchen, we’ve now reached into the video vault for a program related to our <i>previous</i> Kerouac title, 2012’s <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=372">Collected Poems</a></i>.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgpZqJWuTGvp48821qVatyGHBLyNJsx8UIfqbcS5gdEno49vk_tcRvpzMzaXKKRKvBE_dAzdUtTWcuG0VK0kAGwRwhAIat4lh-mFuTicLaejCdROo3DOOUQmBLgYj-w6Inr_JE0VSH3RXY/s1600/121114_kerouac_full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgpZqJWuTGvp48821qVatyGHBLyNJsx8UIfqbcS5gdEno49vk_tcRvpzMzaXKKRKvBE_dAzdUtTWcuG0VK0kAGwRwhAIat4lh-mFuTicLaejCdROo3DOOUQmBLgYj-w6Inr_JE0VSH3RXY/s400/121114_kerouac_full.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Peter Francis James, Loren Schoenberg, and Aaron Diehl in<br />
New York City on Nov. 14, 2012. (Star Black)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The date was November 14, 2012, the location a private residence in New York City. The Library of America brought together actor Peter Francis James, tenor saxophonist Loren Schoenberg, and pianist Aaron Diehl for a jazz-inflected reading of Kerouac’s poetry and prose that paid homage to <i>Poetry for the Beat Generation</i>, the spoken-word LP Kerouac recorded in 1959, accompanied by Steve Allen on piano. <br />
<br />
If viewers familiar with the original album occasionally suspect that James, Schoenberg, and Diehl surpass Kerouac’s own renderings of his works, that’s understandable given the credentials the trio brought to their collaboration. Among his many other credits James has appeared on Broadway opposite Al Pacino in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>, had recurring roles on TV’s <i>Oz</i> and <i>Law and Order</i>, and made a name for himself as a reader of audiobooks. In addition to being a sax player, Schoenberg is the Founding Director and Senior Scholar of the <a href="http://jazzmuseuminharlem.org/" target="_blank">National Jazz Museum in Harlem</a> and the author of <i>The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz</i> (2002). Diehl is the recipient of the 2011 Cole Porter Fellowship from the American Pianists Association and was named the 2014 Monterey Jazz Festival Commission Artist—one of the youngest artists to receive that honor.<br />
<br />
Enjoy the clips below, and watch the complete video of the trio’s performance <a href="https://youtu.be/_lp-hT8VpBg" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QTLxcD721Q4" width="480"></iframe><br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;"><i>Video:</i> Three choruses from <i>Mexico City Blues</i> (3:49)</span><br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vpN3dFixr5w" width="480"></iframe><br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;"><i>Video:</i> Excerpts from <i>On the Road</i> and <i>Visions of Cody</i> (4:21)</span>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-84347214628946981922015-08-03T11:30:00.003-04:002015-08-03T11:30:37.100-04:00An interview with Todd Tietchen: “It took a while for literary culture to catch up with what Kerouac had accomplished.”<span style="color: #660000;">The Library of America’s just-published </span><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=418"><span style="color: navy;">third collection of Jack Kerouac’s writings</span></a><span style="color: #660000;"> brings together three works—<i>Visions of Cody</i>, <i>Visions of Gerard</i>, and <i>Big Sur</i>—distinguished by both their intense engagement with autobiographical materials and their restless formal experimentation. In the following interview, volume editor Todd Tietchen explains why all three titles are ripe for reappraisal by scholars and general readers alike.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 90%;"><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3CmjRHvcGGfrBvNNwDSaxkzPWLDv2XLMavjTeLCWF-ZVTCJLSt57ga3Zx4m0yltxl2yvME_7F7N1qsxGMbk_8TaYIQuO5YQm56SmOXyW1vkfd9mxOeP1tYnZs9hkl1s_-0M2Qaz22rJ-t/s1600/Tietchen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3CmjRHvcGGfrBvNNwDSaxkzPWLDv2XLMavjTeLCWF-ZVTCJLSt57ga3Zx4m0yltxl2yvME_7F7N1qsxGMbk_8TaYIQuO5YQm56SmOXyW1vkfd9mxOeP1tYnZs9hkl1s_-0M2Qaz22rJ-t/s200/Tietchen.jpg" width="200" /></a></span></div><span style="color: #660000;">Tietchen is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he teaches classes in post-WWII American literature and culture. His 2010 book <i>The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana</i> explores the attraction Fidel Castro’s Cuba initially held for writers like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka, and he edited Jack Kerouac’s <i>The Haunted Life and Other Writings</i> in 2014.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>The Note on the Texts in the new volume makes it clear these three works had a complicated publication history. For one thing, they were published in the reverse order in which Kerouac wrote them. Can you shed some light on why that was the case?</i></span><br />
<br />
Kerouac’s works have a complicated publication history in general. Many are well aware that six years passed between the completion of <i>On the Road</i> and its publication by Viking. There are a couple of ways of explaining Kerouac’s complex relationship with the publishing establishment of his time. First, there’s the fact that Kerouac’s subject matter was often considered too transgressive, and indeed he made some significant edits in order to see <i>On the Road</i> published.<br />
<br />
Second is the issue of formal experimentation, an aspect of Kerouac’s work that perhaps remains least understood by readers even today. In the wake of <i>On the Road</i>, Kerouac was branded an intuitive talent—someone who just sat down before the keys and followed his guts, refusing outright the notions of editing and craft. That image is largely false and severs Kerouac from his roots within the twentieth-century experimental arts.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3jNOHaAWb5aA5MLgpLWlAkjxEPOHWlAdOtv8-1cJ8Cr3qOe7d7pyb50v5lpwKAYiOu9Z1BTDpDmS-z2ezVXXzAS5GuxEPH02lrUyFVSCS3ktd7klhhdmsB3F_PELxeLRShWHRgK2f1ua_/s1600/150803_visions_cody_1972.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3jNOHaAWb5aA5MLgpLWlAkjxEPOHWlAdOtv8-1cJ8Cr3qOe7d7pyb50v5lpwKAYiOu9Z1BTDpDmS-z2ezVXXzAS5GuxEPH02lrUyFVSCS3ktd7klhhdmsB3F_PELxeLRShWHRgK2f1ua_/s200/150803_visions_cody_1972.jpg" width="111" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Visions of Cody</i><br />
(McGraw-Hill, 1972)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><i>Visions of Cody</i>, for example, is more a collage of textual experiments than it is a novel per se, and it took a while for literary culture to catch up with what Kerouac had accomplished in his typescript from early 1952. Although James Laughlin’s New Directions published an abridged version of <i>Cody</i> in 1960, the book wouldn’t be publicly available in its full form until 1972.<br />
<br />
I think that with this particular text Kerouac was subject to what John Ashbery has termed the “doubt element.” In his essay “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” Ashbery points out that experimental art is often initially rejected on conditioned impulse. When first encountering a painting by Basquiat or Haring, many instantly balk, “That’s not art!”—which really means “That’s not what I understand art to be!” In such instances, it takes time for our judgment or taxonomic criteria to catch up.<br />
<br />
That’s the significance I think of Truman Capote’s oft-quoted dismissal of Kerouac: “that’s not writing, it’s typing.” Capote didn’t understand, or sympathize with, what Kerouac was after, and I think a similar sort of misapprehension is behind Kerouac’s complicated publication history. As time goes on, Kerouac’s reputation continues to grow in spite of the initial “doubt element.”<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>The line “Cody is the brother I lost” recurs several times in </i>Visions of Cody<i>, which seems like a natural lead-in to </i>Visions of Gerard<i>. Comment?</i></span><br />
<br />
The death of Gerard Kerouac of rheumatic fever at age nine when Kerouac was four years old imprinted itself on his worldview in a substantial way. One of the defining features of his work is the search for male role models or surrogate brothers, like Neal Cassady or Gary Snyder. Kerouac’s lifelong literary project, which he titled the <i>Duluoz Legend</i>, was largely an attempt at memorializing the people he encountered in the face of life’s transience. The early death of Gerard seems to have played a formative role in that aspect of his work as well.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>A good quarter of </i>Visions of Cody<i> is given over to transcripts of recorded conversations between Kerouac and Neal Cassady. What was Kerouac after artistically with this technique—is there a connection to the “spontaneous bop prosody” of </i>On the Road<i>?</i></span><br />
<br />
The connection with spontaneous prose is exactly right. Kerouac had been interested in recording technology since the mid-1940s and there are numerous instances in his journals in which he wishes he were a recording engineer. Some of this desire might again be attributed to Kerouac seeing his artistic project as a memory project—or as a memory prosthesis, as I’ve become fond of saying. At the same time, he’s working through problems related to mimesis: how to represent reality and human involvements in the most convincing fashion.<br />
<br />
Tim Hunt’s recent book <i>The Textuality of Soulwork</i> has done important work in retrieving Kerouac’s relationship to recording technology. In “The Great Rememberer,” Allen Ginsberg likens Kerouac’s transcripts of recorded conversations to Warhol’s work on films such as <i>Empire</i> (1964) a decade later. I think that comparison is not only valid, but again reveals the experimental motivations of Kerouac’s aesthetic that many have missed.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;">Visions of Cody<i> draws on the same material as does </i>On the Road<i>. (Kerouac’s famous reading from </i>On the Road<i> on </i>The Steve Allen Show<i> interpolated passages from </i>Visions<i>.) How is the treatment of that material different in the two books—and are they comparable as achievements?</i></span><br />
<br />
Kerouac believed that <i>Visions of Cody</i> was his masterpiece—the superior telling of <i>On the Road</i>. In his introductory comments to <i>Cody</i>, Kerouac describes it as a “character study” of Cassady, a “vertical” treatment as opposed to the “horizontal” treatment in <i>Road</i>. While writers can’t always be trusted to provide an account of their work and intentions, Kerouac in this case offers a helpful key. <i>On the Road</i> situates Neal in a narrative spanning several years of friendship that is chronological and propulsive. <i>Visions of Cody</i> supplements that treatment with a mosaic of visions of Neal, a multi-perspectival rendering that doesn’t adhere to chronology but instead attempts to provide a more detailed mythology of Cassady’s life from his boyhood years to the time of <i>Cody</i>’s composition. Another way of explaining the differences would be to say that <i>Road</i> presents Neal within a kind of landscape painting, while <i>Cody</i> situates him in a series of aesthetic gestures closer to impressionism, cubism, and montage.<br />
<br />
The other thing that <i>Visions of Cody</i> does—though Kerouac doesn’t hint at this in his introductory comments—is to ask whether an accurate representation of Cassady is even possible. Kerouac’s experiments in narrative come animated by a sense of descriptive doubt that anticipates postmodern literature, in which authors (John Barth, Joan Didion, and Paul Auster among others) compose narratives while at the same time reflecting on what it means to engage in such an effort. Storytelling becomes not just storytelling but a sustained reflection on the stakes involved in storytelling.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>For a first-time reader, one of the major discoveries in </i>Visions of Cody<i> is “Joan Rawshanks in the Fog,” Kerouac’s hallucinatory account of watching a Joan Crawford movie being shot on location in San Francisco. It’s strong enough to work as a standalone vignette. What’s its function in the overall scheme of the book?</i></span><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7sJecDEFMo3PX7fa4Kjy3752SzyBH6wZcxUi5NADR9PnTl-M9zaUkrDJVVZ2avjC1euVeFoezTKtAhoaE5110McwAZFNBIC2ypzbB0ftMTy2ehHE_z96R4I0G8GmMNSc2bv0vu4d7iu2I/s1600/150803_transatlantic_review_jk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7sJecDEFMo3PX7fa4Kjy3752SzyBH6wZcxUi5NADR9PnTl-M9zaUkrDJVVZ2avjC1euVeFoezTKtAhoaE5110McwAZFNBIC2ypzbB0ftMTy2ehHE_z96R4I0G8GmMNSc2bv0vu4d7iu2I/s200/150803_transatlantic_review_jk.jpg" width="129" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Transatlantic Review</i> #9,<br />
1962</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>I think the function of the Joan Rawshanks section, which was published as standalone vignette in <i>Transatlantic Review</i> 9 (1962), is related to the post-modern aspects of <i>Visions of Cody</i>. The point of departure for the section was Kerouac’s observation of Crawford filming a scene for <i>Sudden Fear</i> (1952), directed by David Miller, on location on Russian Hill.<br />
<br />
Kerouac focused much of his attention on the work of film technicians who are highly adept at producing a foggy moonlit night where none in fact exists. He also asks us to consider the distinctions between the “real” Joan Crawford stalking around the set and Crawford the film icon and actress. Again, what seems to be at stake here is the issue of mimesis (and its limitations): to what degree can an aesthetic gesture capture/evoke the real/lived experience?<br />
<br />
As an extended exercise in montage, <i>Visions of Cody</i> poses this question by juxtaposing Kerouac’s literary portrayals of Cassady, the transcripts of the tape recordings, and this meditation on Hollywood film production. In a sense, the text is engaged in a comparative exploration of media forms and how they produce meaning differently—and at what cost for the subjects being portrayed. Furthermore, as a textual collage it bears some similarity to modernist works such as William Carlos Williams’s <i>Spring and All</i> and Jean Toomer’s <i>Cane</i>. When you consider <i>Cody</i>’s mosaic qualities, along with the surrealist (or “hallucinatory”) vibe of sections such as “Joan Rawshanks,” it becomes clear that Kerouac was attempting to synthesize and advance some of the animating concerns of twentieth-century experimentation in art and literature. This is all to say that Kerouac was interested in expressive forms other than jazz.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>In 2015 “Joan Rawshanks in the Fog” reads like an early harbinger of today’s celebrity-mad culture. Is it fair to suggest it also anticipates the situation of </i>Big Sur<i>, when Kerouac seems virtually imprisoned by his own literary fame? (Interestingly, it’s the one book where the Kerouac character is a successful writer and not a traveler/bohemian.)</i></span><br />
<br />
Part of the psychic pain portrayed by Kerouac in <i>Big Sur</i> is obviously attributable to the way in which he’d been branded. To be transformed into an icon is always to be reduced—and the persistent conception of him as the Dionysian, unpolished artist writing a novel a week seems to have cut Kerouac deeply. As should be evident from the above discussion of <i>Visions of Cody</i>, Kerouac’s work was in dialogue with a number of aesthetic movements and concerns that were not properly understood in his time, and remain in need of acknowledgment. I see the Library of America editions of his work as just that sort of acknowledgement.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>The Chronology in the new Library of America volume notes that </i>Visions of Gerard<i> received “poor reviews” when it was published in 1963. Has its critical standing evolved in subsequent decades?</i></span><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfu_SRoax8OUv3feuM1yDP1H566jjlc_xrR2Ps_U7fdkQD6BETZkNxBbH1iJCmQoBQp2SXVvp20o9IV72KnTSljKSZCS7mB-4h6h7a50ngRaxBfgndssn8SBi3whxSIdD_yZIw2iQntmn9/s1600/150803_visions_gerard_1963.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfu_SRoax8OUv3feuM1yDP1H566jjlc_xrR2Ps_U7fdkQD6BETZkNxBbH1iJCmQoBQp2SXVvp20o9IV72KnTSljKSZCS7mB-4h6h7a50ngRaxBfgndssn8SBi3whxSIdD_yZIw2iQntmn9/s200/150803_visions_gerard_1963.jpg" width="138" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Visions of Gerard</i><br />
(Farrar, Straus, <br />
and Cudahy, 1963)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>While it might have been identified as a minor work when it was released, it’s starting to attract more and more scholarly attention. One of the reasons for that attention is that <i>Visions of Gerard</i> (along with <i>Dr. Sax</i> and <i>Maggie Cassidy</i>) opens an ethnographic window on French-Canadian life in New England during the 1920s and 1930s. The extent to which those texts preserve that particular immigrant culture and its life ways makes them a unique contribution to American literature.<br />
<br />
One of the things that strikes me most about <i>Visions of Gerard</i> is that it’s the opposite of the road narratives on which Kerouac’s reputation had been built (for better or worse). Much of it unfolds within the intimate domestic space of a French-Canadian family dealing with the trauma of Gerard’s death. While Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise searched for meaning on the road, Gerard and Ti Jean [Kerouac’s French-Canadian nickname] discover an entire universe searching through the purse of their mother.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #000066;"><i>A startling Christian symbol appears to the narrator near the end of </i>Big Sur<i>. Do we know if Kerouac ever consciously reconciled his Catholic faith with his devotion to Buddhism? Or maybe he felt they didn’t need to be reconciled?</i></span><br />
<br />
Religious and mystical questing is an animating feature of Kerouac’s novels, poems, journals, and correspondence. For the past two years, I’ve read a great deal of Kerouac’s archive in the Berg Collection at New York Public Library and have found myself increasingly struck by the seriousness with which he approached his study of Buddhism. Just this past week I read a manuscript titled <i>Bodhi</i>, which is essentially a collection of Buddhist texts selected and typed by Kerouac in 1954. I believe that he retyped these texts with the hope of committing Buddhist principles and precepts to memory. It’s also clear from the selections—which include the Dhammapada, a collection of the Buddha’s teachings in verse form—that he’d become familiar enough with the Buddhist canon to discern its major works.<br />
<br />
One of the interesting features about <i>Visions of Gerard</i> is that it attempts to reconcile what Kerouac had learned about Buddhist conceptions of existence with his Roman Catholicism. That’s no easy task, as the ways in which Buddhist traditions and Catholic theology approach the meaning of selfhood and the concept of repentance (or contrition) seem irreconcilable to me, completely divergent. The nature of those differences can’t possibly be fully explored in my answer to your question, other than to say that Kerouac ultimately discovered more comfort in Catholicism’s answers to the issues of existence, ego, and repentance. That certainly comes across in the vision of the cross in <i>Big Sur</i>, and in many of his other late writings.<br />
<br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/08/an-interview-with-marilene-phipps.html">An interview with Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell about Jack Kerouac and the “universal experience of being alive”</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/10/jack-kerouac-allen-ginsberg-and-bob.html">Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan: <i>Desolation Angels</i> led to “Desolation Row”</a></li></ul>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-20348379270129221152015-07-31T11:57:00.000-04:002015-07-31T11:57:04.828-04:00Video: E. L. Doctorow pays tribute to Herman Melville’s great “kitchen-sink sort of book”The novelist E. L. Doctorow, who <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/the-library-of-america-remembers-e-l.html" target="_blank">died</a> in New York City last week at the age of 84, was a friend to The Library of America over the years, having contributed an introduction to the LOA edition of Jack London’s <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/paperbackclassics/london.jsp" target="_blank">The Call of the Wild</a></i> and spoken at a number of LOA <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EZaPz5CXpM" target="_blank">events</a>.<br />
<br />
We’re now pleased to present a video highlight of Doctorow’s tribute to Herman Melville’s <i><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=102" target="_blank">Moby-Dick</a></i> at The Library of America's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in New York City on May 17, 2007. The clip is followed by the complete text of Doctorow’s remarks. (The complete video is available <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzFr5PNE5pE&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">here</a>.)<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LMrYprNhyaE" width="480"></iframe><br />
<span style="font-size: 75%;"><i>Video:</i> E. L. Doctorow on May 17, 2007 (1:40)</span><br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: 85%;">Literary history finds a few novelists who achieved their greatness from an impatience with the conventions of narrative. Virginia Woolf composed <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i> from the determination to write a novel without plot. And then James Joyce, of course, who proved himself in the art of narrative writing before he committed his assaults upon it. The author of the sterling narrative <i>Typee</i> and <i>Omoo</i> precedes Joyce with his own blatant subversion of the narrative compact he calls <i>Moby-Dick.</i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Yet I would guess that what Melville does in this novel is not from a grand preconceived aesthetic but from the necessity of dealing with the problem inherent in constructing an entire 19th-century novel around a single life-and-death encounter with a whale. The encounter clearly having to come as the climax of his book, Melville’s writing problem was how to pass the time until then—until he got the <i>Pequod</i> to the Southern Whale Fisheries and brought the white whale from the depths, Ahab crying “There she blows—there she blows! A hump like snow hill! It is Moby Dick!” She blows, I point out to you, not until page 537 of a 566-page book—in my old paperback Rinehart edition.</span><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixHDV1VS1b0XemIdGtSNWLSwcBfKU5TFW8MxgrVABiRUrFi3fmtuOhlrzibUkqNhC_ql3c49RCu6Cp3rHO0uWyz8MhzAuREBik45Y9jpyeac9ukwlfyLUu-TIhasy58FZhjWG9puHfPzyB/s1600/150730_rinehart_moby.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: auto; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixHDV1VS1b0XemIdGtSNWLSwcBfKU5TFW8MxgrVABiRUrFi3fmtuOhlrzibUkqNhC_ql3c49RCu6Cp3rHO0uWyz8MhzAuREBik45Y9jpyeac9ukwlfyLUu-TIhasy58FZhjWG9puHfPzyB/s200/150730_rinehart_moby.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Rinehart edition,<br />
circa 1960s</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;">A writer lacking Melville’s genius might conceive of a shorter novel, its entry point being possibly closer in time to the deadly encounter. And with maybe a flashback or two thrown in. Melville’s entry point, you remember, is not at sea aboard the <i>Pequod</i>, not even in Nantucket: he locates Ishmael in Manhattan—and the book is landlocked for a hundred or so pages until the <i>Pequod</i> in Chapter 22 “thrusts her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">I wouldn’t wonder if Melville at this point, the <i>Pequod</i> finally underway, stopped to read what he had written to see what his book was bidding him to do.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">This is sheer guesswork, of course. I have not read the major biographies, and I don’t know what Melville himself may have said about the writing of <i>Moby-Dick</i> beyond characterizing it as a “wicked book.” Besides, whatever any author says of his novel is of course another form of the fiction he practices and is never, never, to be trusted.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Perhaps Melville had everything comfortably worked out before he began, though I doubt it. Perhaps he had a draft completed of something quite conventional before the writer’s sense of crisis set in. The point to remember is the same that Faulkner once reminded his critics of: that they see a finished work and do not dream of the chaos of trial and error and torment from which it has somehow emerged.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">So let me propose that having done his first hundred or so pages of almost entirely land-based writing, Melville stopped to read what he had written. What have I got here?—the author’s question.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">“This Ishmael—he is logorrheic! Whatever he writes about, <i>he takes his time</i>. With this Ishmael, if I have a hundred or so land-based pages, if I am to keep the proportion of the thing, and the encounter with the whale is my climax, I will need at least 450 pages of sailing before I find him. My God.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">So there was the problem. His sentences had a texture that could conceivably leave his book wallowing with limp sails in a becalmed narrative sea.</span><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR9_ck7TppLX5HRvDRo16GmDuHo81lFyfTTD_vwELvHHhXwm-J7oFKb41VVU_H-oU7rECYjebZWcHLOsvrBmfue2A0QH2r763JP4Rvxpu4Xn6ascTKZWmcgx0WywIfcqM8jI0umffzl7gj/s1600/150730_dodd_moby.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR9_ck7TppLX5HRvDRo16GmDuHo81lFyfTTD_vwELvHHhXwm-J7oFKb41VVU_H-oU7rECYjebZWcHLOsvrBmfue2A0QH2r763JP4Rvxpu4Xn6ascTKZWmcgx0WywIfcqM8jI0umffzl7gj/s200/150730_dodd_moby.jpg" width="168" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Dodd, Mead and <br />
Company, 1923</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;">I will not speculate that there may have come to Melville one of those terrible writer’s moments of despair that can be so useful in fusing as if with lightning the book so far with the book to come. In any event he would for his salvation have to discover that his pages manifested not one but two principles of composition. First, a conventional use of chronological time. After all, Ahab would have to allow the crew the hunting of other whales. So there was that action. Bad weather and worse could reasonably be invoked. There was that action. As Ahab’s maniacal singlemindedness became apparent to the crew, some of them, at least, might contest his authority. Other whalers were abroad around the world. They could be met and inquired of. As indeed there are, what, perhaps eight or nine such encounters with other ships. Given this pattern, a habitual recourse of the narrative, we readers today can make a case for <i>Moby-Dick</i> as a road novel.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">But while in these first 105 pages Ishmael’s integrity as a narrator is maintained, and the set-up for the voyage suggests an assiduous and conventional narrative, there is something else, possibly less visible, a second principle of composition lurking there. It would come to Melville incipiently as a sense of dissatisfaction with his earlier books, and their gift for nautical adventure. While we may know that there is nobody, before or since, who has written better descriptions of the sea and its infinite natures and the wrathful occasions it can deliver, to Melville himself this talent would be of no consequence as he contemplated the requirements of his <i>Moby-Dick</i>, and felt the aching need to do this book, to bring it to fruition out of the depths of his consciousness—to resolve, into a finished visionary work, everything he knew.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">So he looks again at his Ishmael. And he finds in him the polymath of his dreams.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">Ishmael has read his Shakespeare. He knows European history. He is conversant with biblical scholarship, philosophy, ancient history, classical myth, English poetry, lands and empires, geography. Why stop there? He can express the latest thinking in geology (he would know about the tectonic plates), the implications of Darwinism, and look, his enlightened cultural anthropology.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">“I can make this fellow an egregious eavesdropper, so talented as to be able to hear men think, or repeat their privately muttered soliloquies verbatim.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">And it is a fact that no sooner are we at sea, in Chapter 24, does Ishmael step out of time in a big way and give us the first of his lectures on whaling. His big gamble has begun, <i>to pass the time by destroying it</i>, to make a new thing of the novel form by blasting its conventions.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">I know this to be true: Herman Melville may have been theologically a skeptic, philosophically an Existentialist, personally a depressive, with a desolation of spirit as deep as any sea dingle—but as a writer he is exuberant.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">He will load his entire book with time-stopping pedagogy—he will give us essays, trade lore, taxonomies, opinion surveys, he will review the pertinent literature—he will carry on to excess outside the narrative.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">It interests me that Ishmael, who is the source of Melville’s inspired subversion of the narrative compact, must therefore be himself badly used by the author. Ishmael is treated with great love but scant respect—he is Ishmael, all right, in being so easily cast out, and if he is called back it is only to be cast out again. I wonder if it was not a private irony of his author that the physically irresolute Ishmael, with roughly the same protoplasm of the Cheshire cat, is the <i>Pequod</i>’s sole survivor.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">And then of course the excess touches every corner, every nook and cranny below deck, every tool and technical fact of the life aboard the <i>Pequod</i>, and everything upon it, from Ahab’s prosthesis to the gold doubloon he nails upon the mast. The narrative bounds forward from the discussion of <i>things</i>. So finally we look at the details and discover something else: whatever it is, Melville will provide us the meanings to be taken from it.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">This suggests to me the mind of a poet. The significations, the meaningful enlargements he makes of tools, coins, colors, existent facts, even the color of the whale are the work of a lyric poet, a maker of metaphorical meanings, for whom unembellished linear narrative is but a pale joy.</span><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbWNg_iz0dsDthDYNj8VF889WhS5SY4ITQs4zRJi06TuzfoXCXTRaysyxESy-UN8CnDvxzsgJBEwjhIFkf73D_-Y2AAeJ76qmyJY0uRsTCxTImtf8O2EzPIIynKUhlUSLKVXe9DeLE3BVj/s1600/150730_random_house_moby.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbWNg_iz0dsDthDYNj8VF889WhS5SY4ITQs4zRJi06TuzfoXCXTRaysyxESy-UN8CnDvxzsgJBEwjhIFkf73D_-Y2AAeJ76qmyJY0uRsTCxTImtf8O2EzPIIynKUhlUSLKVXe9DeLE3BVj/s200/150730_random_house_moby.jpg" width="147" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Random House, 1930</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Moby-Dick</i> is a big kitchen-sink sort of book into which the exuberant author, a writing fool, throws everything he knows, happily changing voice, philosophizing, violating the consistent narrative, dropping in every arcane bit of information he can think of, reworking his research, indulging in parody, unleashing his pure powers of description—so that the real Moby Dick is the voracious maw of the book swallowing the English language.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">The novel’s greatness is not negated by the fact that our culture has changed and we now no longer hunt the whale as much as we try to save it. In fact, according to newspaper reports, whale watching, not hunting, is now the greatest threat to their well being, or whalebeing. Going out in sightseeing boats to frolic with the whales is a bigger industry now, producing more income, than fishing from them, and threatens to disrupt their migratory patterns and thus their organized means of survival. In fact, one can imagine <i>Moby-Dick</i> as possibly a prophetic document, if one day a Leviathan rises from the sea in total exasperation of being watched by these alien humans, humans who once at least in hunting them were marginally in the natural world, but now in only observing them are in that realm no longer, and so rightly destined for the huge open jaw, and the mighty crunch, and the triumphant slap of the horizontal flukes.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">But whatever the case, I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said American literature begins with <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>. It begins with <i>Moby-Dick</i>, the book that swallowed European civilization whole, and we only are escaped alone on our own shore, to tell our tales.</span><br />
<i><br />
<span style="font-size: 85%;">© 2007 E. L. Doctorow. Used by permission. </span></i></blockquote><br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/the-library-of-america-remembers-e-l.html">The Library of America remembers E. L. Doctorow and his “indelible” novels</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/07/liesl-schillinger-on-e-l-doctorow.html">Liesl Schillinger on E. L. Doctorow’s chronicles of the American century</a></li>
</ul>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-48811795067505802202015-07-29T10:50:00.000-04:002015-07-29T10:53:13.518-04:00Revisionism: Edgar Allan Poe’s “extraordinary nonsense” inspires an ingenious modern art exhibition One of the great enigmas of American literature unexpectedly rejoins the cultural conversation this summer with the opening of <a href="http://www.pacegallery.com/newyork/exhibitions/12746/eureka" target="_blank"><i>Eureka</i></a>, a group exhibition at the Pace Gallery in New York City that takes its name and inspiration from an all-but-unclassifiable book-length work Edgar Allan Poe published in 1848, slightly more than a year before his untimely death at the age of 40.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXURJgQI1yBZGBdJ2O-1MKdLbbHCLcNqNrmODAygnMNuI_jvoFNYIrmaIQanQ0CBm7N1TUzk0QXe5oIiUBKqk64otPYqPAPKkSFatqjH7KNsH1temwa3HqpEkU9tLWDdlWrv7cVT0Uubrc/s1600/150728_eureka_title_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXURJgQI1yBZGBdJ2O-1MKdLbbHCLcNqNrmODAygnMNuI_jvoFNYIrmaIQanQ0CBm7N1TUzk0QXe5oIiUBKqk64otPYqPAPKkSFatqjH7KNsH1temwa3HqpEkU9tLWDdlWrv7cVT0Uubrc/s200/150728_eureka_title_blog.jpg" width="124" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Title page of<br />
<i>Eureka</i> first edition<br />
(Putnam, 1848)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=90" target="_blank"><i>Eureka: A Prose Poem</i></a> is frequently described as a kind of treatise in which Poe expounds his theories of the nature of the universe, from its origins to its overriding laws. But this sketch of the cosmos relies less on any scientific validation than on its author’s intuitive “ratiocination”—the same process, readers will recall, that allowed Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin to solve the murders in the Rue Morgue. As a representative passage attests, <i>Eureka</i> is primarily concerned with collapsing the distance between inner and outer space:<br />
<blockquote>Discarding now the two equivocal terms, “gravitation” and “electricity,” let us adopt the more definite expressions, <i>“Attraction”</i> and <i>“Repulsion.”</i> The former is the body; the latter the soul: the one is the material; the other the spiritual, principle of the Universe. <i>No other principles exist.</i> <i>All</i> phænomena are referable to one, or to the other, or to both combined. So rigorously is this the case—so thoroughly demonstrable is it that Attraction and Repulsion are the <i>sole</i> properties through which we perceive the Universe—in other words, by which Matter is manifested to Mind—that, for all merely argumentative purposes, we are fully justified in assuming that Matter <i>exists</i> only as Attraction and Repulsion—that Attraction and Repulsion <i>are</i> matter. . . .</blockquote><i>Eureka</i> has vexed readers and critics alike since its first publication. A contemporary review in the <i>Literary World</i> panned it as “arrant fudge” and “extraordinary nonsense, if not blasphemy,” and exactly 100 years later T. S. Eliot harrumphed that it “makes no deep impression . . . because we are aware of Poe’s lack of qualifications in philosophy, theology or natural science.” <br />
<br />
Partisans of the work, however, have included poets Paul Valéry and <a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/88rad8hq9780252028496.html" target="_blank">W. H. Auden</a>; it’s also worth noting that Charles Baudelaire translated it into French and Julio Cortázar into <a href="http://www.poe-eureka.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Eureka.pdf" target="_blank">Spanish</a>. More surprisingly, a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/02/arts/02TANK.html" target="_blank">consensus opinion</a> has formed in recent decades around the notion that in its eccentric way <i>Eureka</i> anticipates key discoveries in astrophysics, such as the Big Bang theory and the concept of an expanding universe. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivqQ8RwE59dW50LfWLGZi-ntnJKmvABi5upcpAnLiXF4jhEbWAOXfuRYPCKEa7-y_M976lZPfQGI74-_XrIZSDn30sfHvYM7K04u1wkBZXi819ZehsZD9IN6v_MFR6yEuFWT0qLiMYV8pO/s1600/150729_eureka_pace_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Installation view of "Eureka" at Pace Gallery" border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivqQ8RwE59dW50LfWLGZi-ntnJKmvABi5upcpAnLiXF4jhEbWAOXfuRYPCKEa7-y_M976lZPfQGI74-_XrIZSDn30sfHvYM7K04u1wkBZXi819ZehsZD9IN6v_MFR6yEuFWT0qLiMYV8pO/s400/150729_eureka_pace_01.jpg" title="" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Installation view of <i>Eureka</i><br />
508 West 25th Street, New York / May 1 – August 14, 2015<br />
Photography by: Tom Barratt / Pace Gallery</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
This is the side of Poe’s text that drives the ingeniously curated group exhibition at Pace, which is comprised of 23 works by 12 twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists. Successive artworks alternately portray objects in space—which may or may not be taken to represent planetary bodies—in two and three dimensions; a kind of visual echo or rhyme results from several of the show’s adroit juxtapositions. A 1934 mobile by Alexander Calder, for instance, bounces off an adjacent 1987 painting by Australian Aboriginal artist Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, whose geometric shapes pulsate with a Keith Haring–like energy. James Turrell’s hologram of a full moon confronts viewers with a disorienting <i>trompe l’oeil, </i> while a nearby recording of Edgar Varèse compositions evokes, one might say, the music of the spheres.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv9Qdw7angNuwserVG8SzRZ7DsmhhPGjkbxS6lznIAPpNElqwHWGYoRo9Ya8uagsuiEuSsCba756flbpX7wZSTqHoerB6bNbC4VKqUZo_TckwVkLKWqMyfZLKMWkLXG6Cj9-w3Y8an815x/s1600/150729_eureka_pace_02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Installation view of "Eureka" exhibition at Pace Gallery" border="0" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv9Qdw7angNuwserVG8SzRZ7DsmhhPGjkbxS6lznIAPpNElqwHWGYoRo9Ya8uagsuiEuSsCba756flbpX7wZSTqHoerB6bNbC4VKqUZo_TckwVkLKWqMyfZLKMWkLXG6Cj9-w3Y8an815x/s400/150729_eureka_pace_02.jpg" title="" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">Installation view of <i>Eureka</i><br />
508 West 25th Street, New York / May 1 – August 14, 2015<br />
Photography by: Tom Barratt / Pace Gallery</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
As an <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/01/the-machinery-of-the-universe/" target="_blank">incisive essay</a> by Max Nelson on the <i>Paris Review</i> website summarizes: “the show is a delightful cabinet of curiosities that riffs playfully, if a little abstrusely, on <i>Eureka</i>’s atmosphere and tone.” <br />
<br />
According to his biographer <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Edgar_A_Poe_A_Biography.html?id=lvN0UHnUH6oC" target="_blank">Kenneth Silverman</a>, Poe intimated to a friend that his “prose poem” wouldn’t be properly appreciated until 2,000 years after its appearance. But from the evidence on display at Pace, it’s tempting to conclude that his prediction was off by about 1,800 years. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;"><b><i>Eureka</i> is on view at Pace Gallery New York City through August 28, 2015. Visit the Pace <a href="http://www.pacegallery.com/newyork/exhibitions/12746/eureka" target="_blank">website</a> for complete details.</b></span><br />
<br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/08/bill-marx-on-influence-of-slice-and.html">Bill Marx on the influence of “slice-and-dice” Edgar Allan Poe on “acid-in-your-face” Ambrose Bierce</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/ellen-ullman-on-her-dark-kinship-with.html">Ellen Ullman on her “dark kinship” with Edgar Allan Poe</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/12/mat-johnsons-pym-twists-anew.html">Mat Johnson’s <i>Pym</i> twists anew a controversial Edgar Allan Poe adventure tale</a></li>
</ul>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-70678489829135379912015-07-23T11:53:00.002-04:002015-07-23T11:55:14.696-04:00 The Library of America remembers E. L. Doctorow and his “indelible” novels<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuZOXXdaBnGvclRa9DUXS0_r3rrTL_pVWCy4jp0vUL8BA2mvSP5jkFWFa4vmh_RFUmoQjMyH5aX5s-pzhFbECJS61aWGTRkSI-a934WItmNO2_X416NtPl2iXprskQDgSLzddqS3MUegub/s1600/150723_ragtime.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuZOXXdaBnGvclRa9DUXS0_r3rrTL_pVWCy4jp0vUL8BA2mvSP5jkFWFa4vmh_RFUmoQjMyH5aX5s-pzhFbECJS61aWGTRkSI-a934WItmNO2_X416NtPl2iXprskQDgSLzddqS3MUegub/s200/150723_ragtime.jpg" width="135" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Ragtime</i> by<br />
E. L. Doctorow<br />
(Random House, 1975)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Writer E. L. Doctorow <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/books/el-doctorow-author-of-historical-fiction-dies-at-84.html" target="_blank">died</a> in New York City on Tuesday, July 21, at the age of 84. He was born in the Bronx in 1931 and published his first novel, the spare, haunting neo-Western <i>Welcome to Hard Times</i>, in 1960. Over the next half-century he would continue to reexamine the American past, and simultaneously reanimate the form of the historical novel, in a string of contemporary classics that include <i>The Book of Daniel</i> (1971), a fictional treatment of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage case; <i>Ragtime </i>(1975), later adapted for both film and Broadway; <i>Billy Bathgate </i>(1989), a recreation of the Depression-era Bronx of his childhood; and <i>The March </i>(2005), which brought the author’s imagination to bear on the closing months of the Civil War.<br />
<br />
Doctorow won the National Book Award, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, to name just a few of his many laurels. In 2012 he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Literary critic and translator Liesl Schillinger offered this stirring tribute to him at the <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/07/liesl-schillinger-on-e-l-doctorow.html" target="_blank">induction ceremony</a>: <br />
<blockquote>I first encountered E. L. Doctorow’s writing as a child in the 1970s and ’80s, pulling his novels from my parents’ shelves. I began with <i>Ragtime</i>, and was captivated by the flowing way Doctorow integrated historic events, the changing roles of women and African Americans, and—I’ll admit—raciness, into his storytelling. I was hungry for clues to what adults cared about; and to what being an American <i>meant</i>. His writing informed my understanding, and has stayed with me. The 20th century is over; but the American century lives on, and will endure in Doctorow’s magnificent body of work. . . . how lucky it is that those of us who wish to revisit the most significant touchpoints of our national history may do so <i>not</i> by hoarding towers of text, but by inhabiting the evocative world Doctorow has conjured in his indelible novels.</blockquote>Doctorow was named for Edgar Allan Poe, whom he <a href="http://thevillager.com/villager_75/edgaronedgarel.html" target="_blank">once characterized</a> as “our greatest bad writer.” In a more charitable vein, he contributed an admiring introduction to The Library of America paperback edition of Jack London’s <a href="http://www.loa.org/paperbackclassics/london.jsp" target="_blank"><i>The Call of the Wild</i></a>, which he praised as a “tour-de-force of symbolic transfiguration.” <br />
<br />
In 2014, meanwhile, he read from Herman Melville’s 1850 essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” at a public event co-presented by The Library of America and The Public Theater for the LOA anthology <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=402" target="_blank"><i>Shakespeare in America</i></a>. Listen to Doctorow read what Melville said about Shakespeare, and then enjoy what Doctorow says about Melville, in the video below. <br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5EZaPz5CXpM" width="480"></iframe><br />
<br />
<b>Related post:</b><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/07/liesl-schillinger-on-e-l-doctorow.html">Liesl Schillinger on E. L. Doctorow’s chronicles of the American century</a><br />
<br />
The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-21391622932195192732015-07-20T12:43:00.000-04:002015-07-28T12:18:45.491-04:00Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and the “masterpiece of painting” that survived a meat cleaver attackAn old friend of The Library of America is in New York City for the summer, receiving visitors by the hundreds every day and looking remarkably sharp despite having survived a brush with vandalism and, more recently, commemorated a hundredth birthday. <br />
<br />
The “friend” in this case is the celebrated 1913 <a href="http://metmuseum.org/exhibitions/view?exhibitionId={4F31BE4C-309F-4A01-8A69-45D80D786215}&oid=21429" target="_blank">portrait</a> of Henry James by John Singer Sargent—one of many arresting works featured in the exhibition <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2015/sargent-portraits-of-artists-and-friends" target="_blank"><i>Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends</i></a>, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If the painting looks familiar to Library of America readers, that’s because it graces the dust jacket of the LOA volume <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=64" target="_blank"><i>Henry James: Complete Stories 1898–1910</i></a>. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr4SVun8SM7-v1o-OBIWcoip9o8P9OySMVBZPw7EJKSWIxh_yEmfsDJP_eqb9UAft_uHf0mgV53MHs-X4265v93r4r9hE_j6m9rBw3vTUipHOucHj_DK2ctK5Gyx5KFtirneHzi6Lv95zy/s1600/150720_sargent_james_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr4SVun8SM7-v1o-OBIWcoip9o8P9OySMVBZPw7EJKSWIxh_yEmfsDJP_eqb9UAft_uHf0mgV53MHs-X4265v93r4r9hE_j6m9rBw3vTUipHOucHj_DK2ctK5Gyx5KFtirneHzi6Lv95zy/s400/150720_sargent_james_blog.jpg" width="316" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;">John Singer Sargent, <i>Henry James</i> (1913)<br />
Oil on canvas, 33–1/2 × 26–1/2 in. (85.1 × 67.3 cm)<br />
National Portrait Gallery, London<br />
Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
The Met’s exhibition is an opportunity to appreciate both Sargent’s artistic gifts and the remarkably rarefied nature of his social circle. His portraits encompass other painters, actors, singers, dancers, and of course writers, with <a href="http://metmuseum.org/exhibitions/view?exhibitionId={4F31BE4C-309F-4A01-8A69-45D80D786215}&oid=17494" target="_blank">Robert Louis Stevenson</a> and <a href="http://metmuseum.org/exhibitions/view?exhibitionId={4F31BE4C-309F-4A01-8A69-45D80D786215}&oid=21428" target="_blank">W.B. Yeats</a> both being caught especially vividly. <br />
<br />
Sargent and James became friends after James published an extensive appreciation of the artist’s work in <i>Harper</i>’s magazine in 1887, where he wrote: “In an altogether exceptional degree does he give us the sense that an intention and the art of carrying it out are for him one and the same thing.” Their common experience as American expatriates and members of the cultural elite created a bond between the two men, but today it’s virtually a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/27/arts/sargent-soul-mate-to-henry-james.html" target="_blank">critical commonplace</a> to find deeper affinities between them—to link the psychological depth conveyed in Sargent’s portraits, for instance, with James’s almost obsessive attention to his characters’ inner lives. (This might also help account for why Sargent reproductions <a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/418%2BTF6EwML._SX324_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" target="_blank">regularly</a> <a href="http://img2.imagesbn.com/images/24660000/24661345.JPG" target="_blank">appear</a> on the covers of James paperbacks.) <br />
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The 1913 portrait was a commission by James’s friends and admirers for his seventieth birthday. According to the exhibition catalogue, the author was happy with the result, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jan/30/how-john-singer-sargent-made-a-scene" target="_blank">calling it</a> “Sargent at his very best and poor old HJ not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting.”<br />
<br />
But the “living breathing likeness” almost breathed its last before most people had a chance to see it for themselves. When the painting went on view at London’s Royal Academy in May 1914, a suffragette named Mary Wood attacked it with a meat cleaver, managing to slash the canvas three times before being apprehended. While it is tempting to speculate that Wood was venting her disapproval of the way James had portrayed the women’s movement in his novel <a href="http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=57" target="_blank"><i>The Bostonians</i></a> nearly 30 years earlier, she was in fact engaged in a more general protest at the lack of political representation for women. In the years just prior to World War I, several English suffragettes drew attention to their cause by vandalizing pieces of art, and one theory about the Mary Wood incident <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/the-anarchy-and-ecstasy-of-the-summer-exhibition-9474866.html" target="_blank">suggests</a> that at the time of its unveiling Sargent’s portrait would have symbolized an artistic elite that consisted entirely of men. (The Royal Academy itself was widely understood to be a “<a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/deeds-not-words-suffragettes-and" target="_blank">bastion of conservatism</a>.”)<br />
<br />
James relayed his feelings about the incident in a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Ytg3CfAmV0EC&q=the+tomahawk+was+stayed#v=snippet&q=the%20tomahawk%20was%20stayed&f=false" target="_blank">letter</a> to his friend Jessie Allen:<br />
<blockquote>Yes, it was a nasty one, or rather a nasty three—for she got at me thrice over before the tomahawk was stayed. I naturally feel very scalped and disfigured, but you will be glad to know that I seem to be pronounced curable—to all probability, that is, when the experts have well looked into me. The damage, in other words, isn’t past praying for, or rather past mending, given the magic of the modern mender’s art.</blockquote>James’s optimism was well-founded. Sargent was quickly able to repair the painting with the help of a team of restorers, and The Library of America can attest that today “old HJ” looks none the worse for his ordeal. <br />
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<span style="font-size: 78%;"><b><i>Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends</i> is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through October 4, 2015. Visit <a href="http://metmuseum.org/" target="_blank">metmuseum.org</a> for complete exhibition information.</b></span> <br />
<br />
<b>Related posts:</b><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/tom-sawyers-mississippi-comes-to.html">Tom Sawyer’s Mississippi comes to panoramic full-color life in new Metropolitan Museum exhibition</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/05/harlem-renaissance-literature-plays.html">Harlem Renaissance literature plays strong supporting role in MoMA’s Jacob Lawrence exhibition</a></li>
</ul><br />
The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-88158136142877192512015-07-15T10:57:00.001-04:002015-07-15T11:07:27.192-04:00Annie Liontas: Influences, identity, and what defines the “self-respecting immigrant novel”<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy6rckTkOKbxTLINxX23JI-sTKovAhY3q0xCfLGRvh6iTbxC4dji9xUowZjzX000e7bgzWHBl0rlFX2_7j0-vCb6LyAGhMWiKrY66c7uTwCfCfdd7kZYquSqCp_FpZsNNFxKC7cf_sjJ6r/s1600/150714_liontas_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhy6rckTkOKbxTLINxX23JI-sTKovAhY3q0xCfLGRvh6iTbxC4dji9xUowZjzX000e7bgzWHBl0rlFX2_7j0-vCb6LyAGhMWiKrY66c7uTwCfCfdd7kZYquSqCp_FpZsNNFxKC7cf_sjJ6r/s200/150714_liontas_cover.jpg" width="133" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Let Me Explain You</i><br />
by Annie Liontas<br />
(Scribner, 2015)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>Our series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a post by <b><a href="http://www.annieliontas.com/" target="_blank">Annie Liontas</a></b>, whose debut novel <a href="http://www.annieliontas.com/books/" target="_blank"><i>Let Me Explain You</i></a> arrives this week. Below she describes some of the key influences on her book, which recounts the travails of a Greek-American family in New Jersey. <br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b><i>Middlesex</i> by Jeffrey Eugenides. </b> In writing <i>Middlesex</i>, Eugenides is said to have drafted 50 pages in one voice, picked up a new voice for another 75 pages, grown dissatisfied, and started over again. He did this for about nine years. For Eugenides, the narrative “had to render the experience of a teenage girl and an adult man, or an adult male-identified hermaphrodite.” This was further complicated by Eugenides’s desire to relay “epic events in the third person and psychosexual events in the first person.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">I could not have written <i>Let Me Explain You</i> without <i>Middlesex</i>. It was <i>Middlesex</i> that helped me solve the problem of structure in my own novel, and it was <i>Middlesex</i> that gave me a sense of scope. <i>Middlesex</i> confirmed my voice: it suggested I might have something to add to the conversation, even when scores of others have said their piece with far more eloquence. I am so intimately bound to <i>Middlesex</i> for its beauty, humor, and painful knowing of what it means to be foreign in our own bodies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">And maybe I steal a little bit of Desdemona for myself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b><i>White Teeth</i> by Zadie Smith.</b> Any self-respecting immigrant novel pays homage to <i>White Teeth</i>, which works diligently to allow a multiplicity of voices to speak (this may be the very definition of an immigrant novel). Smith has a wonderful ear for how people talk and for what language sounds like when it’s making its home in a new country.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">Smith wasn’t an immigrant herself, but she grew up around people “who had that experience, who felt separated or cut in two, who had moved from one country to another, who had the sense of leading two lives.” In <i>White Teeth</i>, the children of immigrants resist immigrant parents and claim their lives for their own, sometimes at a great price: assimilation brings alienation. In <i>Let Me Explain You</i>, this experience of exile—<i>xenitia</i>—visits a cost on the daughters of Stavros Stavros Mavrakis.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">But <i>White Teeth</i> is funny, too. Smith says, “If I die and someone says, “She was a comic novelist,” I would be more than happy. My favorite writers are comic novelists. I don’t see any point in being anything else.” Me neither.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><b>El Boom</b>, particularly <b><i>A Hundred Years of Solitude</i> by Gabriel Garcia Marquez</b>—which remains my favorite book—but also <b><i>The Death of Artemio Cruz</i> by Carlos Fuentes.</b> I sought out <i>The Death of Artemio Cruz</i> when I was deep into <i>Let Me Explain You</i>, and I knew that what I had on my hands was a proud, stricken, narcissistic patriarch. I was looking for versions of Stavros Stavros Mavrakis in other novels. I got as close as a shadow to Artemio Cruz, to the indignation and fear of death, to the spite that he wordlessly hurled at his wife and daughter, whom he knew to be selfish and concerned only with his estate. He smelled incense on his death bed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">I mostly hated him, but I had to pay my respects to a man not long for the world. Everyone deserves their dignity, especially at the end.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpt6oBAAzJ5XUZjT2UPPbD5F22WJe5_PS-1EyV9p42ew7qp9x2Vzp9g_P6korM6ZsZTqorpE7ensxzRZ7aGTNMUWa4lP0ydB_ePQ6ST0Kv3pq2QAcR0TOQp7ecSDZRjQ-rosF68bIol2mG/s1600/150714_liontas_blog_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpt6oBAAzJ5XUZjT2UPPbD5F22WJe5_PS-1EyV9p42ew7qp9x2Vzp9g_P6korM6ZsZTqorpE7ensxzRZ7aGTNMUWa4lP0ydB_ePQ6ST0Kv3pq2QAcR0TOQp7ecSDZRjQ-rosF68bIol2mG/s200/150714_liontas_blog_2.jpg" width="141" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>Why the Child Is Cooking</i><br />
<i>in the Polenta</i><br />
by Aglaja Veteranyi<br />
(Dalkey Archive Press, 2012)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: 85%;"><b><i>Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta</i> by Aglaja Veteranyi.</b><br />
<i>Our story sounds different every time my mother tells it.—Aglaja Veteranyi</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">Aglaja Veteranyi, whom you probably never heard of, drowned herself in 2002 in Lake Zurich. A Swiss writer of Romanian origin, Veteranyi was part of a touring circus. Her stepfather was a clown and her mother an acrobat. She, herself, was made to juggle and dance. This is the subject of the novel <i>Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta</i>, which she published before she took her own life (other works released posthumously).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">Vincent Kling notes in his exquisite afterward, having had the vision to translate the work into English, that Aglaja’s voice offers the “adult retrospective viewpoint but at the same time the child’s passage through successive stages of awareness.” Every line is touching, funny, or pained. Everything is true.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;">I read <i>Polenta</i> in a single sitting. I read it thinking, are you my mother? I read it thinking, you can be nobody’s mother. I stopped every few sentences to write something. I read and thought of all those stories of the old witch who fattens children up to eat them. I read <i>Polenta</i> and felt rage at not knowing the good-enough mother. I read it, and it helped me to write Litza as a child, suffering but resilient.</span></blockquote>A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, Annie Liontas won a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and her short story “Two Planes in Love” was a runner-up in <i>BOMB</i> Magazine’s 2013 Fiction Prize Contest. For more than a decade she has dedicated herself to urban education in Philadelphia, Newark, and Camden, New Jersey. <a href="www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/07/let_me_explain_you_by_annie_liontas_reviewed.html" target="_blank">Slate</a> calls <i>Let Me Explain You</i> a “sly and generous debut novel,” and Mary Karr has welcomed it as “a hilarious, fascinating, poetic work of fiction.”<br />
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<b>Related post:</b><br />
<a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/06/joyce-carol-oates-and-jeffrey-eugenides.html">Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides discuss “why we tell stories” at World Science Festival 2012</a> <br />
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<b>Previously in this series:</b><br />
“Influences” posts by <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/07/a-quintessential-black-literary-hero.html">Jabari Asim</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/deborah-baker-on-lafcadio-hearn-and.html">Deborah Baker</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/02/kate-christensen-on-swashbuckling.html">Kate Christensen</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/jennifer-gilmore-on-grace-paley-and-her.html">Jennifer Gilmore</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/lauren-groff-on-profound-generosity-of.html">Lauren Groff</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/lev-grossman-on-ernest-hemingway-verbal.html">Lev Grossman</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/10/jane-hirshfield-on-czesaw-miosz.html">Jane Hirschfield</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/alan-heathcock-on-james-salter-joy.html">Alan Heathcock</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/01/adam-levin-american-literary-influences.html">Adam Levin</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/09/dawn-mcguire-on-christian-wiman.html">Dawn McGuire</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/06/dinaw-mengestu-on-american-writers-who.html">Dinaw Mengestu</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/08/jim-moore-on-how-reading-kenneth.html">Jim Moore</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/05/nobody-knows-my-name-manuel-munoz-on.html">Manuel Muñoz</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/maggie-nelson-american-classics-that.html">Maggie Nelson</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2015/06/viet-thanh-nguyen-we-still-live-in.html">Viet Thanh Nguyen</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2010/08/house-of-walworth-gothic-literature.html">Geoffrey O’Brien</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/05/arthur-phillips-probes-seamless-circle.html">Arthur Phillips</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/12/carl-phillips-on-randall-jarrell-and.html">Carl Phillips</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/04/karen-russell-on-how-joy-williams.html">Karen Russell</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/07/timothy-schaffert-on-how-ambrose-bierce.html">Timothy Schaffert</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/01/philip-schultz-on-robert-longs-blue.html">Philip Schultz</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/05/mark-statman-on-how-kenneth-koch.html">Mark Statman</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/03/emma-straub-on-her-formative-influences.html">Emma Straub</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2011/10/j-courtney-sullivan-on-who-she-re-reads.html">J. Courtney Sullivan</a>, <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/03/ellen-ullman-on-her-dark-kinship-with.html">Ellen Ullman</a>, and <a href="http://blog.loa.org/2012/04/adam-wilson-on-being-bested-and.html">Adam Wilson</a>The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-256801828148573136.post-49784672639059390612015-07-14T12:51:00.001-04:002015-07-14T12:51:14.556-04:00Remembering James Tate, 1943–2015: “I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart”James Tate, one of the most lauded American poets of his generation, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/books/james-tate-prolific-pulitzer-winning-poet-dies-at-71.html" target="_blank">died</a> on July 8 at the age of 71 in Springfield, Massachusetts. <br />
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Tate was still a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1967 when his collection <i>The Lost Pilot</i> was chosen for publication in the influential Yale Series of Younger Poets. During a career that spanned nearly 50 years and more than 20 books, he won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and the <a href="http://www.poets.org/academy-american-poets/winner/prizes/wallace-stevens-award/james-tate-wallace-stevens-award" target="_blank">Wallace Stevens Award</a> from the Academy of American Poets. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>The Lost Pilot</i><br />
by James Tate<br />
(Yale University Press, 1967)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>The title poem of Tate’s first book, “The Lost Pilot,” is included in the Library of America collection <i><a href="http://americanpoetsproject.loa.org/volume/1931082332">Poets of World War II</a></i>. The work is an elegy for Tate’s father, a bomber pilot in the Army Air Forces who was killed on a mission over Germany in April 1944 when Tate was five months old. The Poetry Foundation website has <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/1828" target="_blank">audio</a> of Tate reading the poem, along with an <i>Essential American Poets</i> <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/1824" target="_blank">podcast</a> featuring additional readings and a helpful introduction to Tate’s work. <br />
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Friends and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Tate taught for more than 40 years, remember him <a href="http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/07/friends_colleagues_mourn_passi.html" target="_blank">here</a>. A highly recommended 2006 <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5636/the-art-of-poetry-no-92-james-tate" target="_blank"><i>Paris Review</i> interview</a> with Tate, conducted by Charles Simic, includes this memorable statement of his artistic creed:<br />
<blockquote>I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best. That’s most rewarding for you and for me too. I want ultimately to be serious, but I can’t help the comic part. It just comes automatically. And if I can do both, that’s what I’m after.</blockquote>Tate’s seventeenth collection of poems, <a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/9780062399205/dome-of-the-hidden-pavilion" target="_blank"><i>Dome of the Hidden Pavilion</i></a>, will be published in August. <br />
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The Library of Americahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17586915922688562543noreply@blogger.com0