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| Edith Wharton fotografata da David Levine |
Nota soprattutto per i suoi romanzi, la scrittrice fu anche, a tratti, una poetessa di grande talento, come dimostra questa riflessione su un cielo infuocato.
April 10, 2014
One of my young students at City College once asked me how many writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s were actually born and raised in Harlem. “Not many,” I answered without any real concrete information for her question.
Lauren Olmeda
July11, 2017
I have a tattoo on my left ribcage; it is made up of four lines, drawn to look like the silhouette of a small house, but without a line sealing it at the bottom. To me, it signifies that home is an open-ended concept, one without a lock on the door, one that can be returned to over and over again. The protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, like me, lives between two worlds but never feels fully comfortable or accepted in either. This purgatory sets the course of his (and my own) life, sneaking up on him in moments he least expects it and driving some of his most important decisions. He does not know quite when to give in to the pull of his ancestry or to the illusion of American-ness he has cultivated his entire life. I grew up stretched across an ocean, pulled between Germany and the United States from the age of barely fifteen. Having moved abroad at such a young age, I was malleable and moldable, ever-changing yet desperately trying to retain whatever American identity I had managed to create by then. I was resistant to my new home, never referring to it as such but instead calling it “this place.” I blamed my parents for yanking the rug out from under me and transporting me to a new continent just as I was beginning to discover myself. I was hesitant to make friends, not wanting to abandon the ones I’d left behind and for whom I stayed up till 5 AM, chatting away online as if we were still in the same time zone. Even as I settled into my new school, the sense that I was betraying who I thought I was nagged at me with persistence. I wanted to be happy, but being happy felt like giving in, accepting my reality, instead of rebelling against it as I’d sworn to do from the very first day.
Kate Wilkins
March 3, 2014
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| Shirley Jackson |
Ignored by critics during her lifetime, the Haunting of Hill House author is now recognised as a great American novelist
She has been cited as an inspiration by Stephen King, Donna Tartt, Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris. Now the American author Shirley Jackson, once memorably described as writing “not with a pen but a broomstick”, is set for a long overdue reappraisal on this side of the Atlantic.
“And the first thing they did was segregate me” goes the opening line of Shirley Jackson’s 1941 short story in the New Republic. In the enigmatically titled “My Life with R. H. Macy,” an unnamed Macy’s shopgirl narrates her first day at the store until the moment she abruptly walks off the job forever. Although this was Jackson’s first publication in a commercial magazine, the first sentence is typical of the blunt and uncanny style for which she would later become known. The story also prefigures a career in which she’d frequently be discriminated against and misunderstood. She was 25 at the time. This is how the magazine’s bio line introduced her to the public: “Shirley Jackson, the wife of Stanley Hyman, is living in New Hampshire and writing a novel.”
Wearily, moving his feet because he had nothing else to do, Christopher went on down the road, hating the trees that moved slowly against his progress, hating the dust beneath his feet, hating the sky, hating this road, all roads, everywhere. He had been walking since morning, and all day the day before that, and the day before that, and days before that, back into the numberless line of walking days that dissolved, seemingly years ago, into the place he had left, once, before he started walking. This morning he had been walking past fields, and now he was walking past trees that mounted heavily to the road, and leaned across, bending their great old bodies toward him; Christopher had come into the forest at a crossroads, turning onto the forest road as though he had a choice, looking back once to see the other road, the one he had not chosen, going peacefully on through fields, in and out of towns, perhaps even coming to an end somewhere beyond Christopher’s sight.
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| Vladimir Nabokov by David Levine |
In 1937, Vladeslav Khodasevich, an émigré poet and champion of “V. Sirin’s” work, wrote, “Sirin [Nabokov] proves for the most part to be an artist of form, of the writer’s device, and not only in that . . . sense of which . . . his writing is distinguished by exceptional diversity, complexity, brilliance, and novelty.” Khodasevich went on to say that the key to all Sirin’s work was his ability to put all his literary devices on display, with little or no attempt to conceal them, thus entertaining his readers more with the revelation of how the magician performs his tricks, than with the trick itself. “The life of the artist and the life of a device in the consciousness of an artist—this is Sirin’s theme.” Khodasevich, although he had not yet read The Gift—purported to be Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest Russian novel—had discovered the most important element of Nabokov’s fiction.
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| Vladimir Nabokov |
40 years after his death, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita continues to mesmerise and shock in equal measure. His greatest achievement however, is not the story of Humbert Humbert's perverse affection, but rather his own artistic endurance as a writer
Saturday 7 June 2014 08.30 BST
SEA OAK by George Saunders
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The characters in these absurdly funny stories are trapped by hyper-capitalism and their own foolishness, as Saunders investigates the prisons we make for ourselves
Some writers work within a tradition, and some create a world from whole cloth. There aren’t many who can do the whole-cloth bit, but George is one of them. Within the universe of American writing, there really is a continent called GeorgeSaunders-Land, where the people speak funny, and the social contract has either broken down or been bent out of all recognition, and our most intimate lives feel like reenactments of something we maybe saw on TV. If he were just a vicious satirist, he would still be hugely enjoyable, but what sets him apart is his willingness not only to go into the heart of darkness but to suggest possible routes out. The cool kids don’t dare do that, but George always has, and without sanctimony or even a hint of righteousness. I once heard him describe satire as “the inverse praise of good things.” Seen from this perspective, George’s career has been a 20-year praise-song to the power of language, the grandeur of the visible world, and the awesome possibility of genuine enlightenment. That we can even see this through the parade of holy fools, venal idiots, smiling demagogues, degraded environments, and twisted corporate spaces he has presented us over the years is a testament to his extraordinary skill.
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| George Saunders |
Interview
The Lincoln in the Bardo author is back with another metaphysical tale. He discusses Buddhism, partisan politics and the terrifying flight that changed his life
The ghosts of Lincoln in the Bardo return to confront a dying oil man’s destructive legacy – but this time they feel like a gimmick
Random House announced today that a brand new novel by George Saunders will be landing on bookshelves this winter, on January 27, 2026. Vigil takes “place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his life, as he is ferried from this world into the next.” (After Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders is cornering the post-death literature market, it seems.)
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| George Saunder |
This week the American writer George Saunders, celebrated for his short stories, won the Man Booker prize with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. He talks about brevity, empathy and how he sees writing as a form of activism
Paula Cocozza
Wednesday 18 October 2017
George Saunders won the Man Booker prize on Tuesday night, but while he was working on Lincoln in the Bardo, his winning book, he would sometimes stop and ask himself if it really was a novel he was writing. He still sounds a little unsure. “I still, I still … I mean, it says it is!” he says, pointing to the dustjacket; US tradition dictates that a novel is specified as such on its cover.
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| George Saunders by Damon Winter |
