Envoi by Somerset Maugham

 

Envoi

by William Somerset Maugham

WHEN your ship leaves Honolulu they hang leis round your neck, garlands of sweet smelling flowers. The wharf is crowded and the band plays a melting Hawaiian tune. The people on board throw coloured streamers to those standing below, and the side of the ship is gay with the thin lines of paper, red and green and yellow and blue. When the ship moves slowly away the streamers break softly, and it is like the breaking of human ties. Men and women are joined together for a moment by a gaily coloured strip of paper, red and blue and green and yellow, and then life separates them and the paper is sundered, so easily, with a little sharp snap. For an hour the fragments trail down the hull and then they blow away. The flowers of your garlands fade and their scent is oppressive. You throw them overboard.

The Taipan by Somerset Maugham

 

THE TAIPAN

By William Somerset Maugham

No one knew better than he that he was an important person. He was number one in not the least important branch of the most important English firm in China. He had worked his way up through solid ability, and he looked back with a faint smile at the callow clerk who had come out to China thirty years before. When he remembered the modest home he had come from, a little red house in a long row of little red houses, in Barnes, a suburb which, aiming desperately at the genteel, achieves only a sordid melancholy, and compared it with the magnificent stone mansion, with its wide verandahs and spacious rooms, which was at once the office of the company and his own residence, he chuckled with satisfaction. He had come a long way since then. He thought of the high tea to which he sat down when he came home from school (he was at St. Paul’s), with his father and mother and his two sisters, a slice of cold meat, a great deal of bread and butter and plenty of milk in his tea, everybody helping himself, and then he thought of the state in which now he ate his evening meal. He always dressed, and whether he was alone or not he expected the three boys to wait at table. His number one boy knew exactly what he liked, and he never had to bother himself with the details of housekeeping; but he always had a set dinner with soup and fish, entree, roast, sweet and savoury, so that if he wanted to ask anyone in at the last moment he could. He liked his food, and he did not see why when he was alone he should have less good a dinner than when he had a guest.

The Fall of Edward Barnard by Somerset Maugham

The Fall of Edward Barnard

by William Somerset Maugham

Somerset Maugham / La caída de Eduardo Barnard

BATEMAN Hunter slept badly. For a fortnight on the boat that brought him from Tahiti to San Francisco he had been thinking of the story he had to tell, and for three days on the train he had repeated to himself the words in which he meant to tell it. But in a few hours now he would be in Chicago, and doubts assailed him. His conscience, always very sensitive, was not at ease. He was uncertain that he had done all that was possible, it was on his honour to do much more than the possible, and the thought was disturbing that, in a matter which so nearly touched his own interest, he had allowed his interest to prevail over his quixotry. Self-sacrifice appealed so keenly to his imagination that the inability to exercise it gave him a sense of disillusion. He was like the philanthropist who with altruistic motives builds model dwellings for the poor and finds that he has made a lucrative investment. He cannot prevent the satisfaction he feels in the ten per cent which rewards the bread he had cast upon the waters, but he has an awkward feeling that it detracts somewhat from the savour of his virtue. Bateman Hunter knew that his heart was pure, but he was not quite sure how steadfastly, when he told her his story, he would endure the scrutiny of Isabel Longstaffe's cool grey eyes. They were far-seeing and wise. She measured the standards of others by her own meticulous uprightness and there could be no greater censure than the cold silence with which she expressed her disapproval of a conduct that did not satisfy her exacting code. There was no appeal from her judgment, for, having made up her mind, she never changed it. But Bateman would not have had her different. He loved not only the beauty of her person, slim and straight, with the proud carriage of her head, but still more the beauty of her soul. With her truthfulness, her rigid sense of honour, her fearless outlook, she seemed to him to collect in herself all that was most admirable in his countrywomen. But he saw in her something more than the perfect type of the American girl, he felt that her exquisiteness was peculiar in a way to her environment, and he was assured that no city in the world could have produced her but Chicago. A pang seized him when he remembered that he must deal so bitter a blow to her pride, and anger flamed up in his heart when he thought of Edward Barnard.

Mackintosh by Somerset Maugham

Mackintosh

by William Somerset Maugham

Somerset Maugham / Mackintosh

HE splashed about for a few minutes in the sea; it was too shallow to swim in and for fear of sharks he could not go out of his depth; then he got out and went into the bath-house for a shower. The coldness of the fresh water was grateful after the heavy stickiness of the salt Pacific, so warm, though it was only just after seven, that to bathe in it did not brace you but rather increased your languor; and when he had dried himself, slipping into a bath-gown, he called out to the Chinese cook that he would be ready for breakfast in five minutes. He walked barefoot across the patch of coarse grass which Walker, the administrator, proudly thought was a lawn, to his own quarters and dressed. This did not take long, for he put on nothing but a shirt and a pair of duck trousers and then went over to his chief's house on the other side of the compound. The two men had their meals together, but the Chinese cook told him that Walker had set out on horseback at five and would not be back for another hour.

Rain by Somerset Maugham

Rain 

by William Somerset Maugham 

Somerset Maugham / Lluvia

It was nearly bed-time and when they awoke next morning land would be in sight. Dr. Macphail lit his pipe and, leaning over the rail, searched the heavens for the Southern Cross. After two years at the front and a wound that had taken longer to heal than it should, he was glad to settle down quietly at Apia for twelve months at least, and he felt already better for the journey. Since some of the passengers were leaving the ship next day at Pago-Pago they had had a little dance that evening and in his ears hammered still the harsh notes of the mechanical piano. But the deck was quiet at last. A little way off he saw his wife in a long chair talking with the Davidsons, and he strolled over to her. When he sat down under the light and took off his hat you saw that he had very red hair, with a bald patch on the crown, and the red, freckled skin which accompanies red hair; he was a man of forty, thin, with a pinched face, precise and rather pedantic; and he spoke with a Scots accent in a very low, quiet voice.

Somerset Maugham / The Letter

The Letter

By William Somerset Maugham

Somerset Maugham / La carta

Outside on the quay the sun beat fiercely. A stream of motors, lorries and buses, private cars and hirelings, sped up and down the crowded thoroughfare, and every chauffeur blew his horn; rickshaws threaded their nimble path amid the throng, and the panting coolies found breath to yell at one another; coolies, carrying heavy bales, sidled along with their quick jog-trot and shouted to the passer-by to make way; itinerant vendors proclaimed their wares. Singapore is the meeting-place of a hundred peoples; and men of all colours, black Tamils, yellow Chinks, brown Malays, Armenians, Jews and Bengalis, called to one another in raucous tones. But inside the office of Messrs. Ripley, Joyce and Naylor it was pleasantly cool; it was dark after the dusty glitter of the street and agreeably quiet after its unceasing din. Mr. Joyce sat in his private room, at the table, with an electric fan turned full on him. He was leaning back, his elbows on the arms of the chair, with the tips of the outstretched fingers of one hand resting neatly against the tips of the outstretched fingers of the other. His gaze rested on the battered volumes of the Law Reports which stood on a long shelf in front of him. On the top of a cupboard were square boxes of japanned tin, on which were painted the names of various clients.

Film / The Letter by Somerset Maugham

 

THE LETTER (1927)

by Somerset Maugham

Posted on 16 November 2014 

by Cavershamragu

At night on a Malaya rubber plantation a gunshot rings out. A man stumbles out of a bungalow, pursued by a woman, who empties all the chambers of her revolver into him. The moonlight reveals a distraught, gun-toting Bette Davis – this is the unforgettable opening of the 1940 version of The Letter, adapted from Somerset Maugham’s celebrated short story and play, which had been filmed several times already.

Grace Paley

An Interview With Grace Paley

Gail Pool / Shirley Roses

July 6, 2012

NBR: You are a writer, teacher, political activist, wife and mother. How do you manage so much?

Paley: I remember somebody once asking that and I gave my usual wise-guy remark: pure neglect. You know, something like that. But really, I think that any life that’s interesting, lived, has a lot of pulls in it. It seems to me natural that I’d be pulled in those ways. When you’ve got children, you don’t want to just hand them over to somebody. It’s interesting how children grow and you deprive yourself if you give too much of it away. I don’t mean that you don’t want to be free, you do, you want all that. But that’s again a pull, you’re pulled, and it’s only one life for Christ’s sake. And you are privileged somehow to do as much as you can. I wouldn’t give any of it up. And I’ve talked a lot about this with women’s groups because I think that in whatever is gained, that everything, that the world should be gained. But that nothing should be given up. I think a good hard greed is the way to approach life. (Laughter).

Grace Paley / Mother

Edward Hopper

Mother 

by Grace Paley

One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: "Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway." By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway. As a matter of fact, she did stand frequently in various doorways looking at me. She stood one day, just so, at the front door, the darkness of the hallway behind her. It was New Year's Day. She said sadly, If you come home at 4 a.m. when you're seventeen, what time will you come home when you're twenty? She asked this question without humor or meanness. She had begun her worried preparations for death. She would not be present, she thought, when I was twenty. So she wondered. 

Grace Paley / The Big Life of a Small Woman

 

Grace Paley

GRACE PALEY

The Big Life of a Small Woman

Maya KlausnerSeptember 23, 2010

Tearful laughter, raunchy story telling, and punchy witticisms are not the typical ingredients one expects to find in a tribute to a late literary legend. Then again, Grace Paley and ‘typical’ never met.

Last Tuesday the Center for Jewish History and Jewish Women’s Archive paid homage to the poet, short story writer and political activist, who passed away in her Vermont home in August 2007. The evening consisted of a panel discussion with excerpts from Lilly Rivlin’s new film, “Grace Paley: Collected Shorts.” The film, which premiered at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July, will be shown at a selection of upcoming festivals on the East Coast, including the New York Jewish Film Festival in January.

 

Grace Paley

An Interview With Poet and Fiction Writer Grace Paley

by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler

DIRECT QUOTE

3.17.08

Celebrated short story writer and poet Grace Paley died of cancer last August at the age of eighty-four. A lifelong activist, pacifist, and an early figure in the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, Paley was one of those writers who managed to combine a public life of frequent readings and appearances in support of a range of causes with work lauded for its artistic integrity. A familiar figure at writers conferences and rallies against, over the years, the war in Vietnam, nuclear proliferation, apartheid in South Africa, and the Iraq War, she was tireless in her efforts to bring injustice to light. As one of the first American writers to explore the lives of ordinary women in her work, she broke ground and served as a role model for women writers who came of age in the ‘60s and ’70s. In her writing and activism, she achieved something rare, a life in which the public persona and the private person were one.

The 100 greatest jewish books / Later the same day by Grace Paler (1985)

LATER THE SAME DAY

by GRACE PALEY 

(1985)

By Sara Ivry

September 16, 2013 • 11:59 PM

A master of the short story, Paley excels at exposing the small regrets and ruptures that chafe and scar landsmen and kin in midcentury. Fortified by a frankness and brass-tacks approach to life tethered to a Yiddish pragmatism, her characters argue over progressive politics and struggle with social change while trying to love and live every day. Paley’s stories offer intimate, often messy personal exchanges that are compelling and familiar—sometimes achingly so.

TABLET

FICCIONES
Casa de citas / Philip Roth / Grace Paley
Casa de citas / Grace Paley / Las hermosas cosas de todos los días

DE OTROS MUNDOS
Grace Paley / Cosas de todos los días
Grace Paley / Cuentos completos / Reseña
Grace Paley / Deseos

Grace Paley / El hombre agobiado

Grace Paley / Una mujer de letras y de acción

Grace Paley / Hombres, devolvednos la cortesía

Grace Paley / Dos oídos, tres golpes de suerte

DRAGON

Obituries / Grace Paley

Grace Paley / A brief survey of the short story

Grace Paley / The Art of Fiction
Grace Paley / Wants
Grace Paley / Samuel
Kelly Link / Books that changed me

The 100 greatest jewish books / Later the same day by Grace Paler (1985)

An Interview With Poet and Fiction Writer Grace Paley

Grace Paley / The Big Life of a Small Woman

KISS

Grace Paley / House: Some Instructions

Grace Paley / On Mother´s Day
Grace Paley / Autumn
Grace Paley / That Country

DANTE

Grace Paley, la scrittrice scintillante e ribelle, la Cechov di New York City

BIOGRAPHIES

Grace Paley

 

Don Winslow

'The Cartel' Is A True Crime Adventure With A Killer Protagonist

Alan Cheuse

June 24, 2015

The dedication of Don Winslow's novel The Cartel is nearly two pages long: a list of journalists who were either murdered or "disappeared" in Mexico between 2004 and 2012 — the period covered in this hugely hypnotic new thriller.

The Cartel by Don Winslow / Review

The Cartel by Don Winslow

Maybe I should stop writing reviews on famous writers who have already attracted the attention of consolidated newspapers and magazines but The Cartel by Don Winslow (Arrow Books, 2015) that I just finished deserves some more attention. It is indeed a great work for a writer to show the machine behind the drug world and its business with a similar civil indignation as Saviano’s Gomorra showed but with the structure of a novel.

'The Border' Is Shakespeare For Our Times — Seriously

Jason Sheehan

March 3, 2019

I have two things to say about The Border, the final book in Don Winslow's drug war trilogy. Both things are equally important. Both things are equally true.

The first is that it's a very good book. The second is that it isn't.

I'm going to start with the second thing first.

The Overlooked Autofiction of Yuko Tsushima

 

Yuko Tsushima

The Overlooked Autofiction of Yuko Tsushima

By Abhrajyoti Chakraborty

April 9, 2019

At times, autofiction can seem to refer not so much to a genre as to our desire, collectively, to seek the author in a text. We group together novels by Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Jenny Offill because they make it easy to presume that the writer is the protagonist. This freedom feels new, so we assume that autofiction must be new, too. For precedent, we reach for “Reality Hunger,” David Shields’s manifesto, from 2010, in which he called for a “deliberate unartiness.” We forget Flaubert, who declared “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”; or Virginia Woolf, who rejected the fictions of her predecessors because “on or about December 1910 human character changed”; or even J. M. Coetzee, who published three novels about a writer named John Coetzee at the turn of this century. We overlook not just history but intent. James Baldwin, for instance, is still characterized by his themes (blackness, America) and tones (“prophetic,” “angry”) but rarely recognized for the self-implicating imagination of his early novels. A character named Manto might show up repeatedly in the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories, but the author’s reputation is still that of a chronicler of Bombay and the partition of the Indian subcontinent. With some writers, it is precisely their biography that gets in the way of a full literary reckoning. We can only deal with them in terms of what they are writing about.

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima review – Bracing, often breathtaking

The mother finds that as a woman alone in society, people want not so much to help her as to control her

John Self
Saturday, April 14, 2018

 

One way to realistically depict the months and years passing in a novel is to publish it in real time. That is what Yuko Tsushima did with this book, released in monthly instalments in the Japanese literary magazine Gunzo in 1978-79 and now translated into English for the first time.

Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima review / Tales from Tokyo

Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima review – tales from Tokyo

This short, powerful novel translated by Geraldine Harcourt follows a single mother’s struggles to build a life in the city

Peter Beech
Fri 20 Apr 2018 15.00 BST

The highly regarded Japanese novelist Yūko Tsushima, who died two years ago, drew on her own experiences for this 1979 novel, translated by Geraldine Harcourt, about a single mother struggling to build a life in Tokyo. Its 12 linked tales of the city are fine-grained to the point of mundanity – finding an apartment, discovering a leak, visiting a park – but in Tsushima’s hands they achieve a deceptive, luminous clarity.

 

‘My Struggle: Book 5,’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard

By Hari Kunzru

April 27, 2016

MY STRUGGLE
Book 5
By Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Don Bartlett
624 pp. Archipelago Books. $27.

Almost 600 pages into this, the fifth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumental “My Struggle,” the 28-year-old would-be novelist finally secures a book deal. He has been writing for a decade with immense seriousness and little success. At one point he reprints a few overwrought paragraphs, which he once hoped would form the beginning of a novel. “This is what I had,” he writes. “Two years’ work. I knew every sentence by heart.”

Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard review – from cotton buds to sex as cannibalism

The second volume of the bestselling author’s seasonal musings meander between the laughable and the sublime

Anthony Cummins
Tue 21 Nov ‘17 09.00 GMT

I

n Autumn, Karl Ove Knausgaard mused on whatever came to mind during his (now ex) wife’s pregnancy with their fourth chid, Anne. Winter, the second in a quick-fire seasonal quartet published in Norwegian two years ago, repeats the formula for the run-up to her birth early in 2014, with 60 prose pieces between two and five pages long on everything from cotton buds to the 1970s and “hollow spaces”.

Linn Ullmann

Full of desperate longing: Unquiet, by Linn Ullmann, reviewed

UnquietLinn Ullmann, translated from the Norwegian by Thilo Reinhard

Hamish Hamilton, pp.400, 14.99

Boyd Tonkin

3 October 2020

The scrawny little girl with ‘pipe-cleaner legs’ wants to feel at home with her parents. But father and mother live mostly apart —the former in Sweden, the latter in Norway or New York — and the trio fails to bond: ‘It was never us three.’

Portrait of Carlos II of Spain, painted around 1680 by Juan Carreño de Miranda.MUSEO DEL PRADO

Research confirms that intermarrying caused the ‘Habsburg jaw’ in Spanish royals

After analyzing portraits, a team of geneticists and surgeons has confirmed the link between the diplomatic strategy adopted by the dynasty and their prevalent overbite

Manuel Ansede

4 December 2019

According to historian Jaime Contreras, the birth of Charles II of Spain on November 6, 1661, was used as an excuse to organize a huge party in Madrid, complete with extravagant costumes in the shape of animals and demons. “Hundreds of astrologers made predictions,” he wrote in his book Charles II, The Bewitched. “The best known predicted that the prince would become king. Most of the astrological charts supported it: Saturn was the planet that sent the strongest message, a star was found on the horizon of the Spanish court without a malicious aspect.” All too soon, however, the predictions would be proven wrong.

 

Resistance fighter Simone Ségouin in Paris in 1944.

The Spanish role in the French Resistance

British historian Robert Gildea deconstructs the official version of events in his new book

Guillermo Altares

Madrid, 12 October 2016

The story that France constructed for itself after World War II goes like this: the country was liberated by the Resistance with some help from the Allies, and save for “a handful of wretches,” to use the words of General Charles de Gaulle, the rest of France’s citizens behaved like true patriots.

 

View of Canfranc station.CARMEN SECANELLA

The Spanish train station that became a hub for Nazis, gold and spies

Mired in myth, this vast international railway terminal in Huesca was a hotbed of espionage, and a trade route for Spanish tungsten and German loot during the Second World War. Now almost half a century since it closed, there are positive signals of its revival

Virginia López Enano

9 February 2018

Canfranc is white, cold and smells of garlic soup and wood smoke. Nestled in the narrow valley in La Jacetania, Huesca, it has 500 residents and one main street, which is split in two by a mammoth railway station that was inaugurated by Alfonso XIII in 1928 and saw its last train pull out for France in 1970. Its history is brief but earned the town international notoriety.

Review / ‘Hush Hush’ by Laura Lippman

 

Review: ‘Hush Hush’ by Laura Lippman

By Maureen Corrigan
February 22, 2015

In “Hush Hush,” the 12th of Laura Lippman’s bestselling Tess Monaghan mysteries, Tess is no longer the star of her own series. That honor now belongs to her daughter: a 3-year-old scene-stealer-in-pigtails named Carla Scout. Tess was pregnant with this usurper-in-utero in her last outing; now she’s a working mom, frantically trying to wedge her detecting gigs into the relentless daily round of mealtimes, meltdowns, playtimes and bedtime. These days, when Tess says she’s “packing,” she’s more likely to be referring to goldfish and Gummi bears than to a pistol.

‘Wilde Lake,’ one of Laura Lippman’s finest novels, feels personal

‘Wilde Lake,’ one of Laura Lippman’s finest novels, feels personal



By Patrick Anderson

April 28, 2016

Laura Lippman’s “Wilde Lake” is one of her best novels and feels like one of her most personal. The story takes us deep into the life of Luisa (Lu) Brant, seen both as a child and as the state’s attorney of Howard County, Maryland. The book is unusual in that Lippman spends more time relating Lu’s childhood and family life than she does the novel’s nominal plot, which concerns a murder case that Lu prosecutes. But Lippman’s portrayal of Lu’s girlhood and family is so exceptional, readers won’t miss the legal drama. You rarely find characterizations as sensitive as these in genre fiction or, indeed, any fiction.