HAPPY ANTIPODEAN: Less Nobel is more, says laureate Lessing, talking with the BBC. "All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed," says the nonagenarian author who has been "in constant demand".
CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Early in the life of this blog
I looked at the numerous covers for the numerous editions of Mikhail Bulgakov's wonderful and bizarre
The Master and Margarita, as well as his other books.
THREE PERCENT: It’s no secret that we’re huge fans of the
New York Sun “Arts+” section and most of the reviewers who write for it. (Especially Ben Lytal, who, in my opinion, has the sweetest gig in all book reviewing.) Since the
Sun has yet to penetrate the Rochester market, we usually resort to reading this online.
VULPES LIBRIS: The main criterion for being shelved in Literature, I discovered, was being dead. Not merely the long-dead, like Austen and Dickens and Eliot and Hardy – survivors of the test of centuries – but the more recently deceased were located here, too.
* Yann Martel's
Life of Pi has
captured Abe Books' Best of the Booker survey, edging out Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children.
THE ELEGANT VARIATION: LA City Beat
calls Michael Chabon's
Maps and Legends "a treasure trove of intriguing and revealing looks at where Chabon goes to make up his worlds and how he tells his fables of the reconstruction."
CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: The above is an image of the actress
Louise Brooks relaxing between takes and surrounded by books. This image, and Brooks herself, first came to my attention via the cover to the NYRB Classics edition of
The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
THE MILLIONS: Independent bookshop owner
Heidi Hallett has tackled both these issues by doing what the best independent shopkeepers do - opting for the intimate, the local.
WUTHERING EXPECTATIONS: When an author writes a story about another artist – a painter, a composer, a choreographer* – what is she really writing about?
Recently, I wrote that I always assume that the artist character is really a disguised writer. A little glib, I know, but this is my starting point until convinced otherwise.
THREE PERCENT: Scott Esposito has
an excellent essay on Bolaño, and how translations are received in the U.S., up at Hermano Credo. You should go check it out:
Eighty years ago,
S.S. Van Dine - a pseudonym for Willard Huntingon Wright and the author, most notably, of the Philo Vance detective novels -
came up with a list of twenty rules for how detective fiction should and should not be written.
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