Monday, August 31, 2020

Forgotten Authors No. 5 / R. Austin Freeman

R Austin Freeman, Crime Novelist – Collectors' Notes and Bibliography –  BookAddiction

Forgotten Authors

 No 5

 R. Austin Freeman


“Freeman … treats criminals in a more balanced manner than Conan Doyle. His working-class characters – particularly in Mr Polton Explains – are decent, skilled and hard-working, but are still crushed by the system. His 30-odd books are certainly worth rediscovery.”

The Complete Dr. Thorndyke - Volume III: Short Stories Part II - Dr.  Thorndyke's Casebook, The Puzzle Lock and The Magic Casket: Amazon.es:  Freeman, R. Austin, Marcum, David: Libros en idiomas extranjeros


Richard Austin Freeman enjoyed a prolific career that saw him gain qualification as pharmacist and surgeon, pull off a diplomatic coup along the Gold Coast, work for Holloway Prison and become a formidable man of fiction. For the first twenty-five years of his writing career, Freeman was to dominate and remain unrivalled in the world of detective fiction, introducing the well-loved and highly memorable Dr Thorndyke. Through the creation of this character, Richard Austin Freeman continues to be read as an extremely popular addition to the world of the mystery novel.

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Dr. Richard Austin Freeman MRCS LSA (11 April 1862 – 28 September 1943) was a British writer of detective stories, mostly featuring the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr. Thorndyke. He invented the inverted detective story (a crime fiction in which the commission of the crime is described at the beginning, usually including the identity of the perpetrator, with the story then describing the detective's attempt to solve the mystery). Roberts said that this invention was Freeman's most noticeable contribution to detective fiction. Freeman used some of his early experiences as a colonial surgeon in his novels. Many of the Dr. Thorndyke stories involve genuine, but sometimes arcane, points of scientific knowledge, from areas such as tropical medicinemetallurgy and toxicology.

Amazon.com: The Best Dr. Thorndyke Detective Stories (Dover Mystery  Classics) (0800759814817): Freeman, R. Austin, Bleiler, E. F.: Books
Early life

Austin Freeman was the youngest of the five children of tailor Richard Freeman and Ann Maria Dunn. At the age of 18 he entered the medical school of the Middlesex Hospital and qualified MRCS and LSA in 1886.


After qualifying, Freeman spent a year as a house physician at the hospital. He married his childhood sweetheart Annie Elizabeth Edwards in London on 15 April 1887,[4] and the couple later had two sons. He then entered the Colonial Service in 1887 as an assistant surgeon. He served for a time in KetaGhana, in 1887 during which time he dealt with an epidemic of black water fever which killed forty percent of the European population at that port. He had six months of leave from mid 1888 and returned to Accra on the Gold Coast just in time to volunteer for the post of medical officer on the planned expedition to Ashanti and Jaman.
Freeman was the doctor, naturalist and surveyor for an expedition to Ashanti and Jaman, two independent states in the Gold Coast. The expedition set out from Accra on 8 December 1888, with a band consisting of a band-master and six boys playing two side drums and five fifes,[7] three European officers (Freeman, the Commissioner, and the Officer in Charge of the Constables), one Native officer, 100 Hausa constables, a gunners' party with a rocket trough, an apothecary, apothecary's assistant, a hospital orderly, and 200 bearers. The expedition went first to Kumasi (or Coolmassie as it appears in older accounts), the capital of the then independent kingdom of Ashanti. Their second port of call was BondoukouIvory Coast, where they arrived only to find that the king had just signed a protectorate treaty with the French.
However, the expedition was a political failure as the British spokesman blurted out in front of the chiefs the British were willing to supply the loan of £400 which the king had requested. However the King had requested this loan with the proviso that it be kept secret from his chiefs. He therefore denied any knowledge of the loan and the expedition moved on to Bontúku, the capital of Jaman. Here they were left cooling their heels while the King there finalised a treaty with the French, who had been quicker off the mark. The expedition was recalled after five months.[9] Bleiler asserts, without any supporting evidence, that It was mostly through Freeman's intelligence and tact that the expedition was not massacred. Although the mission overall was a failure, the collection of data by Freeman was a success, and his future in the colonial service seemed assured. Unfortunately, he became ill with blackwater fever and was invalided home in 1891, being discharged from the service two months before the minimum qualification period for a pension.
R. Austin Freeman – Delphi Classics

Career




Thus, he returned to London in 1891, and in c. 1892 served as temporary Acting Surgeon in Charge of the Throat and Ear Department at Middlesex Hospital. He was in general practice in London for about five years. He was appointed acting Deputy Medical Officer of Holloway Prison in c. 1901, and Acting Assistant Medical Officer of the Port of London in 1904. A year later he suffered a complete breakdown in his health and gave up medicine for authorship.
His first successful stories were the Romney Pringle rogue stories published in Cassell's Magazine in 1902 and 1903,[13] written in collaboration with John James Pitcairn (1860–1936), medical officer at Holloway Prison, and published under the nom de plume "Clifford Ashdown".
In 1905 Freeman published his first solo novel, The Golden Pool, with the background drawn from his own time in West Africa. The hero is a young Englishman who steals a fetish treasure. Barzun and Taylor make the point that while this is a crime, the book is not regarded as crime fiction as according to old notions stealing things from African natives is no crime. Bleiler says it is a colorful, thrilling story, all the more unusual in being ethnographically accurate . . . and that . . . it used to be required reading for members of the British colonial services in Africa.
His first Thorndyke story, The Red Thumb Mark, was published in 1907, and shortly afterwards he pioneered the inverted detective story, in which the identity of the criminal is shown from the beginning. Some short stories with this feature were collected in The Singing Bone in 1912. During the First World War he served as an induction physician and a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and afterwards produced a Thorndyke novel almost every year until his death in 1943.
The Eye Of Osiris eBook por R. Austin Freeman - 9788827561393 | Rakuten  Kobo México
Later life

Freeman briefly stopped writing at the outbreak of the Second World War, but then resumed writing in an air-raid shelter he had built in his garden. Freeman was plagued by Parkinson's disease in his later years. This makes his achievement all the more remarkable, as in his declining years he wrote both Mr. Polton explains, which Bleiler says . . . is in some ways his best novel,[ and the Jacob Street Mystery (1942) in which Roberts considers that Thorndyke . . . is at his analytical best . . . He was living at 94, Windmill Street, GravesendKent when he died on 28 September 1943.[ His estate was valued at £6,471 5s 11d. Thorndyke was buried in the old Gravesend and Milton Cemetery at Gravesend. The Thorndyke File started a funding drive to erect a granite marker for Freeman's grave, and this was erected in September 1979, with the text: Richard Austin Freeman, 1862 – 1943, Physician and Author, Erected by the friends of "Dr. Thorndyke", 1979.

7 BEST SHORT STORIES BY R. AUSTIN FREEMAN EBOOK | AUGUST NEMO | Descargar  libro PDF o EPUB 9783968583280

Political views
Freeman held conservative political views.As early as 1914 in his novel The Uttermost Farthing, the main character espouses views unacceptable today, referring to the "criminal class" as vermin that needed to be exterminated—which the character, Humphrey Challoner, proceeds to do. The motivating factor was Challoner's wife was killed by a burglar whom she caught in the act. Challoner sets himself on the path of revenge. Before he finally happens on the actual perpetrator, he acts as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to kill 24 other men. He then displays their skeletons in his "museum" and processes their heads to shrunken heads, which he keeps hidden.


In his 1921 book Social Decay and Regeneration Freeman put forth the view that mechanization had flooded Britain with poor-quality goods and created a "homogenized, restless, unionized working class". Freeman supported the eugenics movement and argued that people with "undesirable" biological traits should be prevented from breeding through "segregation, marriage restriction, and sterilization". The book also attacked the British Labour movement and criticised the British government for permitting immigrants (whom Freeman referred to as "Sub-Man") to settle in Britain. Social Decay and Regeneration referred to the Russian Revolution as "the Russian catastrophe" and argued society needed to protected from "degenerates of the destructive or" Bolshevik "type."  Sections of Social Decay and Regeneration were reprinted in Eugenics Review, the journal of the British Eugenics Society.

R. Austin Freeman. The Cat's Eye. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, | Lot  #70337 | Heritage Auctions
Anti-Semitism
Freeman's views on Jews were complex stereotypes. They are clearly set out in his eugenicist book Social Decay and Regeneration (1921). Here Freeman states that of vulgarity the only ancient peoples who exhibited it on an appreciable scale were the Jews and especially the Phoenician.[29] Freeman notes that a large proportion of the Alien Unfit crowding the East End of Londonlargely natives of Easter Europe are Jews. However, the criticism is of the poor rather than of Jews overall as these unfit aliens were far from being the elect of their respective races.Freeman regards that, through restricting marriage with non-Jews, Jews as having practised racial segregation for thousands of years with the greatest success and with very evident benefit to the race. Not surprisingly, some of these views spill over into his fiction.
Grost states that Helen Vardon's Confession (1922) is another bad Freeman novel suffering from offensive racial stereotypes, Helen Vardon is blackmailed into marrying the fat, old, moneylender Otway, who was distinctly Semitic in appearance, and is surrounded by Jews, to save her father from prison. Otway acts in bad faith, and is grasping, keeping only one servant despite his great wealth. The whole plot is a gratuitously offensive anti-Semitic stereotype. Grost also states that the use of racial stereotypes in The D'Arblay Mystery (1926) marks it as a low point in Freeman's fiction. However, the villain is not Jewish at all, and the only question of stereotypes comes up in the questions about whether the villains (false) hooked nose is a curved Jewish type or, or a squarer Roman nose? There are no anti-Semitic tropes in the book, no grasping money-lender etc. Grost describes Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke (1931), as degenerating into another of Freeman's anti-Semitic diatribes. In this novel the villains are largely Jewish, and come from the community of unfit aliens that Freeman lambastes in Social Decay and Regeneration.[32]
Such offensive representations of Jews in fiction were typical of the time. Rubinstein and Jolles note that while the work of many of the leading detective story writers, such as Agatha ChristieDorothy L. Sayers, and Freeman, featured many gratuitously negative depictions of stereotyped Jewish characters, this ended with the rise of Hitler, and they then portrayed Jews and Jewish refugees in a sympathetic light. Thus with Freeman, the later novels no longer present such gratuitously offensive racial stereotypes, put present Jews much more positively.
In When Rogues Fall Out (1932) Mr. Toke describes the Jewish cabinetmaker Levy as A most excellent workman and a thoroughly honest man, high praise from Freeman's pen. The counsel for Dolby the burglar, a good-looking Jew named Lyon executes a particularly brilliant defence of his client which Thorndyke admires. In Felo de Se; or Death at the Inn (1937) the croupier is described as: a pleasant faced Jew, calm, impassive and courteous, though obviously very much "on the spot". In The Stoneware Monkey (1938) Thorndyke is using a young Jewish man as his messenger. In Mr Polton Explains (1938) Polton is assisted first by the Jewish watchmaker Abraham and then by the Jewish solicitor Cohen comes to Polton's aid not once but twice, not only representing him without cost, but feeding him and loaning him money without interest or term.

659: Spoiler Warning 14 – The Eye of Osiris, a.k.a. The Vanishing Man  (1911) by R. Austin Freeman | The Invisible Event
Writing
In Bloody MurderJulian Symons wrote that Freeman's . . . talents as a writer were negligible. Reading a Freeman story is very much like chewing dry straw.[37] Symons then went on to criticise the way in which Thorndyke spoke. De Blacam also noted Thorndyke's ponderous legal phraseology. However, that pedantic ponderousness is the nature of Thorndyke's character. He is a Barrister and used to weighing his words carefully. He never discusses his analysis until he has built the whole picture. Others do not agree with his assessment of Freeman's writing skills. Raymond Chandler, in a 13 December 1949 letter to Hamish Hamilton said: This man Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer. He has no equal in his genre and he is also a much better writer than you might think, if you were superficially inclined, because in spite of the immense leisure of his writing he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected.
Binyon's also rates Freeman's writing as inferior to Doyle saying Thorndyke might be the superior detective, Conan Doyle is undeniably the better writer.[40] The Birmingham Daily Post considered that Mr. Austin Freeman was not, perhaps, among the finer artists of the short story, and his longer stories could limp, sometimes but that his approach was very effective.
However, de Blacam makes the point that, quite apart from the description of the investigation, each of the descriptions of the crimes in the inverted stories was a fine piece of descriptive writing. Grost agrees that Freeman's descriptive writing is excellent  Adey finds that: Freeman’s writing, though lacking Doyle’s atmospheric touch, was clear and concise, with dry humor and a keen eye for deductive detail. Adams agreed that Freeman had considerable powers of narrative description when he stated that Nothing but the author’s remarkable skill in character delineation and graphic narrative could save his stories from being regarded as technical studies for a course on forensic medicine.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Bleiler noted in 1973 that Freeman . . . is one of the very few Edwardian detective story writers who are still read.




Friday, August 28, 2020

Forgotten Authors No 01 / E M Delafield

Delafield, E. M. - LIBROS DEL ASTEROIDE
EM Delafiel

Forgotten Authors

No 01

E M Delafield


Christopher Fowler
Sunday 10 August 2008


Edmée Elizabeth Monica De La Pasture lived through two world wars, writing immensely popular novels, stories and non-fiction, could be as laugh-out-loud funny as PG Wodehouse, and numbered housewives and prime ministers among her fans. The Sussex-born daughter of a Count, she enlisted as a nurse in the First World War and as a lowly ARP worker in the second, and also worked on a Russian collective farm. In the UK, only a handful of her 30-plus publications can now be found on bookshelves.

Her five most famous books are largely autobiographical. The Diary of a Provincial Lady chronicles the author's daily life as she tries to balance the housekeeping books and run a family. Written in a deceptively relaxed shorthand, it's a Pooterish masterpiece of 20th-century humour that shows how easily Delafield could communicate unspoken feelings of embarrassment and annoyance. Here she is at tea:
"Lady B asks me how the children are, and adds, to the table at large, that I am 'A Perfect Mother'. Am naturally avoided, conversationally, after this, by everybody at the teatable. Later on, Lady B tells us about the South of France. She quotes repartees made by herself in French, and then translates them. (Unavoidable query presents itself here: Would a verdict of Justifiable Homicide delivered against their mother affect future careers of children unfavourably?)" And here she is on the blackouts: "Serena alleges that anonymous friend of hers goes out in the dark with extra layer of chalk-white powder on her nose so as to be seen, and resembles the Dong With The Luminous Nose. (Query: Is it in any way true that war very often brings out the best in civil population? Answer: So far as I am concerned, Not at all.)"
Perhaps Delafield's gossamer charm is not suited to coarser times. Virago did her no favours by shoving four volumes into one dense paperback, prefaced with a peculiarly mean-spirited forward that they later had the good sense to remove. Provincial Lady was eventually serialised for radio in the UK, but Delafield's other novels remain virtually lost. The diaries are comedies of manners, but she also tackled lesbian feelings, real-life murder, alcoholism, all manner of family cruelties, adulteries and betrayals. Delafield's reasonable voice is currently out of favour, but thankfully she survives in the nation's second-hand bookshops, awaiting rediscovery.

Forgotten Authors No 45 / Winifred Watson

Winifred Margaret Watson-Armstrong (1894–1912)
Winifred Watson


Forgotten Authors

No. 45

Winifred Watson


Christopher Fowler
Sunday 3 January 2010 01:00

When it comes to literary success, timing is everything. Before JK Rowling's boy wizard there had been a virtual industry of magic-schoolboy tales, but Harry Potter was the one that clicked. Winifred Watson's literary career was curtailed by three major events; the depression, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Blitz.
Watson was born in 1906 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and remained there all her life. Due to follow her sisters into higher education, she found the way blocked when her father's shoe shops failed in the Depression of 1929. She wrote her first book, the Northumbrian historical drama Fell Top, in dull days stuck behind a secretarial desk, after her boss suggested bringing in knitting to keep herself amused. Finishing it in six weeks, she stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it until she spotted an advert from Methuen looking for new writers. The novel was critically well-received and became a radio play. Watson was young and pretty, and got local coverage, so the publishers asked her for more. The result was Odd Shoes, produced in a different style that benefited from proper research.

Watson, W: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day Persephone Classics ...

Her third book horrified Methuen. Instead of being serious, it was fun, and she was writing on subjects she knew nothing about. The book was Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, about a frumpy governess who is accidentally sent by her agency to work for a louche actress and nightclub singer running a complicated love life. Watson said: "I didn't know anyone like Miss Pettigrew. I just made it all up. I haven't the faintest idea what governesses really do. I've never been to a nightclub and I certainly didn't know anyone who took cocaine."
The book was an immediate hit, and a Hollywood musical was planned starring Billie Burke, the good witch from The Wizard Of Oz. The bombing of Pearl Harbor put paid to that. "I wish the Japanese had waited six months," she said later.


Watson married and wrote every day, but when the house next door was blown up in the war, her family was forced to move into one room with her parents, making writing impossible.
Persephone Books persevered with the republication of Miss Pettigrew, and the book found its way on to Hollywood desks once more. A rather charming film version starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams finally appeared in 2008, six years after Watson's death.


The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler / Book review by David Hill

The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler – book review


Arthur Mee. Photo/Alamy
Obituaries of authors, many of whom are not dead, make an entertaining read.
I’m pretty sure it was Tessa Duder who remarked of a writer, in a critical essay, that “she lived long enough to see her books forgotten”. I remember the shudder of recognition down my spine. Who was the sad she? Sorry, I’ve … forgotten.
Distilled from years of Independent on Sunday columns, Christopher Fowler’s obituaries (they are not meant to be, but they often read that way) are not so much a who’s who as a “Who?”
There are 99 mini-essays on individuals, plus a few diversions into Forgotten Booker Authors, including a winner who had died; Forgotten Nonsense Writers, including the laceratingly funny Harry Graham; Forgotten Dickens, including something called Mugby Junction.
Each 500-word entry is a brief bio, a smattering of titles, an assessment, a couple of anecdotes. Breath-catchingly amoral Simon Raven once telegraphed his wife, “Sorry no money. Suggest eat baby”; Lobsang Rampa of The Third Eye was a Devon plumber called Cyril. Isn’t that just great?
Fowler’s choices are sometimes provocative, as they should be. Mystery writer Margery Allingham has vanished? What a mysterious claim. Arthur Upfield, Barbara Pym, Georgette Heyer? Make up your own mind.
You’ll accept the obscurity of others. Try Kyril Bonfiglioli, Lucille Fletcher, or the gloriously christened Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett. As I’m sure you know, they were respectively the creator of mincing 1970s art thief Charlie Mordecai, a US script writer hugely admired by Orson Welles and an Anglo-Irish aristocratic novelist who always used a quill pen.
So what edged them and many others into the shadows? Chance. Marketing. The Blitz. Illness. Chance. Changing social mores. Addiction. Chance.
It’s a commendably eclectic selection. We get Frank Richards of Billy Bunter fame; Ian Fleming’s older brother Peter; Michael Green, who wrote books entitled The Art of Coarse [insert subject] about just about everythingArthur Mee, children’s encyclopaedist and author of that seminal article “Our Wonderful Glands”.
Evaluations are free and frank: “a disgraceful cliffhanger”; “a horrible human being”. Fowler won’t be getting a Christmas card from the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (“artery-hardening New Age sputum”) or Booker-topping The Sellout (“motor-mouth”).
He may have written the most emetically coy author note of the decade, but the guy cares about books and their authors. A lot of his pieces build to a plea for restoring reputations, and he gets quite emotional about the arbitrary injustice of neglect. True: why is Keith Waterhouse here, and not Jeffrey Archer? A paradoxically reassuring book – for writers – in its emphasis on Fortune’s wheel. Its other paradox is that it may boost the subjects’ sales. In second-hand bookshops, anyway.

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Annemarie Schwarzenbach / A Life


Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Annemarie Schwarzenbach 
A Life

Annemarie Schwarzenbach was born on May 23rd, 1908 in Zurich, into one of the richest families in Switzerland of that period. Her father, Alfred Schwarzenbach, was one of the great patrons of the textile industry. She grew up in the family house and studied History in Zurich and Paris. In 1931, she received her doctorate and wrote her first book. In 1930, she made friends with Erika and Klaus Mann, with whom she remained close for most of her life. Schwarzenbach lived as a writer in Berlin where she had her first experiences with morphine. From 1933, she began traveling, first with the photographer Marianne Breslauer, to the Pyrenees, then to the Near East. Her first six-month trip took her to Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Baki and Teheran where she met the French diplomat, Claude Clarac. In 1934, she accompanied Klaus Mann to the first Congress of Writers, in Moscow.
Schwarzenbach was often in conflict with her family. It was because of this turmoil that she made her first suicide attempt. Shortly thereafter, she left for Teheran to marry Claude Clarac. She obtained French nationality and a diplomatic passport. But, soon after, she fell into a depression, which was aggravated by her appetite for drugs. In addition, her love affair with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador in Teheran, provoked a scandal.

The Travels of Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Annemarie Schwarzenbach
CR MUSE: THE TRAVELS OF ANNEMARIE SCHWARZENBACH
LOOKING BACK AT THE SWISS JOURNALIST WHOSE PURSUIT OF ADVENTURE MASKED A DARK PERSONAL LIFE

This is CR Muse, a series dedicated to the remembrance of important artists and idea-makers from our past who have shaped culture as we know it today. From traditional creators to those of conceptual thought, we celebrate these women known not only for their work but their confident, eccentric style as well.
annemarie-schwarzenbach-writer
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Annemarie Schwarzenbach burned brightly, but quickly. The novelist, journalist, and photographer cultivated an impressive career, chronicling everything from the Great Depression in America to the rise of fascism in Europe all before her untimely death at the age of 34. Hers was a life so filled with adventure and drama, it's surprising that her story has not inspired a Hollywood epic.



Schwarzenbach was born in Switzerland in 1908 to an aristocratic background and family wealth. She could have easily led a charmed life, but instead chose to pursue a career in writing. By 23, she earned a doctorate in history from the University of Zurich, publishing her first book shortly after.

annemarie-schwarzenbach-journalist-writer
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
By all accounts, she was enigmatic yet alluring. Looking back at photos of her, one can easily see why. At a time when it was still socially unacceptable for women to wear pants, she stood out with short hair and a wardrobe largely comprised of menswear. Whether or not this had anything to do with her mother dressing her as a boy when she was a child, Schwarzenbach looked at ease in suits and trousers. It’s no wonder she inspired Clare Waight Keller’s Spring/Summer 2019 collection for Givenchy—who wouldn't want to harness the same self-possession Schwarzenbach exudes?

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By 1933, she began traveling, writing for Swiss publications along the way. Her adventures abroad heightened in 1936 when she married French diplomat Achille-Claude Clarac. The marriage was largely one of convenience (both Schwarzenbach and Clarac were gay), but the union earned her a diplomatic passport. It is unclear when her interests in photography began, but it is certain that her trip to the U.S. that same year honed her skills as a photojournalist.


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Despite the thrilling adventures that took Schwarzenbach far and wide, her personal life was filled with darkness. Frequently described as “fragile,” she struggled with depression, addiction, and an overbearing family. In the 1930s, her family made it increasingly clear that they sympathized with the rising Nazis. Schwarzenbach, an anti-fascist, was torn between her family and what she knew was right. The push-and-pull led to her first suicide attempt.


What might've been a form of escapism, she developed a morphine addiction early on in her career. Though she tried to fight it off—including taking a trip with fellow writer Ella K. Maillart, in which they drove from Switzerland to Afghanistan—she was never able to combat her addiction. By 1940, Schwarzenbach returned to the U.S., but her second trip was marred with darkness. A breakup with American writer Carson McCullers lead to depression and a second suicide attempt. After a few more trips, she returned to Switzerland for good.






Her death was an accident. While riding her bike with no hands, Schwarzenbach fell and hit her head. Due to a misdiagnosis, she died nine weeks later. Upon her death, her mother destroyed her diaries and letters (fearing what they might do to the family’s reputation). Thankfully, a friend was able to preserve her photographs. This, along with Schwarzenbach’s already-published pieces, made an archive possible, and by the 1980s, her career was rediscovered—as was her extraordinary influence as an accomplished journalist, fearless adventurer, and pioneer of androgyny.


Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Don DeLillo on Trump's America / 'I'm not sure the country is recoverable'



Bright, barbed … Josie Lawrence and Joe McGann in rehearsal for Love-Lies-Bleeding. Photograph: Henry C Krempels




Don DeLillo on Trump's America: 'I'm not sure the country is recoverable'


He has spent half a century dissecting America’s dreams and nightmares. Now the great novelist is imagining what his ‘deluged’ country will be like three years from today

Xan Brooks
Monday 5 November 2018


Whenever he’s able to separate himself from the distractions of daily life, from family obligations and the rolling thunder of 24-hour news, Don DeLillo taps out a few pages of his latest book. He writes out of habit and because he’s in the grip of an idea that won’t let him rest. He’s constructing a story set around the next corner, in an America he may not live to see. Obliquely, unavoidably, he’s writing about Donald Trump.

Lost in DeLillo

The Body Artist (English Edition) eBook: DeLillo, Don: Amazon.es ...




LOST IN DELILLO


Newsletter 4.2 (2010)
—Randy Laist
When I finished the manuscript of my recent book on Don DeLillo, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo’s Novels, I knew that I wanted my next project to be a kind of vacation from the hypnotic seriousness and esoteric hyper-literacy that I had come to associate with DeLillo’s writing.  When an opportunity presented itself to edit a collection of essays about the television show Lost, my first thought was that this excursion into a madcap expression of popular culture would be a perfect change of pace.  Imagine my surprise when one of the first writers to contact me with an abstract was Jesse Kavadlo, whose book about DeLillo, Balance at the Edge of Belief, had been published by the same press that issued my DeLillo book.  As the abstracts continued to come in, it became a recurring pattern that many of the same scholars who had something to say about Lost had published on or taught DeLillo at some point in the recent past.  You might scoff and say that DeLillo is a popular enough author that there is no coincidence here, but when you add to this quasi-anecdotal evidence the startling fact that DeLillo’s most recent book, Point Omega, and the sixth (and final) season of Lost both debuted on the same day (February 2, 2010), you have a clue that neither DeLillo fans nor Lost fans – both practiced in teasing out the semantic nuances of manifestly meaningless coincidences – could possibly ignore.