Friday, August 31, 2018

Sister act / Female friendship in fiction from Woolf to Ferrante and Zadie Smith

Illustration by Lucy Macleod


Sister act: female friendship in fiction from Woolf to Ferrante and Zadie Smith


Forget wives and mothers, the heroines of new books by Deborah Levy, Emma Cline and Zadie Smith are defined by the other women in their lives

 Alex Clark
Sat 6 Aug 2016
I
n 1926, the novelist Rose Macaulay found herself bothered by the attentions of enthusiastic readers, and one in particular who visited, bringing lilies of the valley. When Macaulay went out to lunch to try to get rid of her she simply tagged along. “Writing books is a terrible magnet for such as her,” confided Macaulay in a letter to her sister Jeanie. “They are so very boring, as a rule.” Being polite in such circumstances only made it worse, and protestations of busyness had no effect. “Anyhow,” concluded the letter, “I have enough friends already, and I do resent people thinking that they can become friends merely by pushing their way in. As a matter of fact, I select my friends with great care, and only have those who please me a great deal. There must be a way out of these problems, I wish I could hit on it. I must ask other novelists what they do.”
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Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith / Review by Sameer Rahim

Zadie Smith

Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith: review


Zadie Smith's essays are brilliant, in parts, finds Sameer Rahim



7:00AM GMT 12 Dec 2009


Changing My Mind is not the book Zadie Smith intended to write. She had been planning a novel and a critical work to be entitled, after Beckett, “Fail Better”. While failing to write these, she accepted invitations from various magazines to write on her favourite authors: George Eliot, Franz Kafka, E?M Forster. Alongside her miscellaneous film reviews, travel writing, memoir and a new piece on her friend David Foster Wallace, Smith found she had enough material to fill a book.
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Thursday, August 30, 2018

Ten Books To Read This Summer


Ten Books To Read This Summer

These novels, memoirs, poetry collections and other page-turners will keep you entertained while looking smart while basking on the beach or sweating on the subway

by ANELISE CHEN



 Your Brain Is a Time Machine, by Dean Buonomano 
At the end of his life, Einstein wrote a letter of condolence to a late friend’s family to say that in quantum physics, there is no distinction between past, present, and future. Physicists now accept that the arrow of time is but an illusion; there is no consensus, however, as to why time feels the way it does, as an unfolding of events. In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, best-selling author and brain researcher Buonomano proposes his theory on how the brain constructs the experience of time as a linear, chronological flow, enabling us to “time travel” into the past and future. (W. W. Norton & Co., $27)

So Much Blue, by Percival Everett 
Experimental novelist Percival Everett has never written a book with a conventional plot, and that’s part of what makes his work worthwhile. In his latest, So Much Blue, a renowned painter named Kevin Pace toils over a secret blue painting that he won’t reveal to anyone, recalling Balzac’s short story “The Unknown Masterpiece.” The novel is a commentary, perhaps, on the exquisite torture of expressing the inexpressible, of never quite getting there. Set in Paris, El Salvador, and New England, this quiet, wise novel is like a flame: illuminating, and cool blue at the core. (Graywolf Press, $16)

The Leavers, by Lisa Ko 
Inspired by a 2009 New York Times story about an undocumented woman from Fuzhou who was detained at a Greyhound station and kept mostly in solitary confinement for a year and a half, Lisa Ko’s new novel is especially relevant for our times. Polly Guo is a firecracker of a woman, a village girl who makes it all the way to New York City with nothing but a fierce will to survive. Selected by Barbara Kingsolver for the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Award Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, The Leavers is a scathing critique of our immigration system and the hypocrisies of the American Dream. (Algonquin, $26)

Dear Cyborgs, by Eugene Lim
Lim’s third novel might be the most delightful read you’ll find all summer. Two Asian-American boys bond over their love of comic books in a small Ohio town; they disperse; and from there, their lives lurch from one possible world to another, as futures do when we can’t yet see them. Or maybe the future is all too clear, and the totalizing forces of capitalism are impossible to escape, but these superheroes refuse to accept defeat. Through seamlessly incorporated meditations on political protest and radical art, Dear Cyborgs is an effortless page turner that dares the reader to believe in the power of the imagination. (FSG Originals, $14)

Cool for You, by Eileen Myles 
It’s about time for a reissue of Eileen Myles’s cult classic, and this Soft Skull edition includes an introduction by Chris Kraus, making it a double pleasure. Myles’s narrator hails from working-class Boston and works at a state asylum for mentally disabled men; later we discover she’s trying to hunt down the files on her grandmother, who was mysteriously institutionalized for unspecified reasons. What does it mean to be a mad woman? As Kraus suggests, this book (first published in 2000) is not so much “about” female madness as it is a “writing-out”— in all its gory, intimate complexity. (Soft Skull Press, $17)

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy
In the two decades since the publication of her Booker Prize–winning first novel, A God of Small Things, Roy has worked as an environmental and human rights activist and written mostly nonfiction. Now, with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, she has found a way to combine all those years of witness with narrative fiction. From Old Delhi to the valleys of Kashmir, Roy zooms in on the lives of her characters—a transgender woman living in a graveyard; an architecture student in love with a freedom fighter—while contextualizing their struggles within the larger Indian tableau. Fortified with fact, this novel is definitely worth the wait.  (Knopf, $29)

Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002), by David Sedaris 
The best-selling memoirist returns to the form that launched his career — the diary. Theft by Finding is composed of selections from a diary that spans twenty-five years, tracing Sedaris’s journey from his hometown of Raleigh to Chicago, where he studied art, to New York City, where he worked as a Macy’s elf, and finally to Paris and beyond. Throughout his journey, Sedaris never stops observing, recording, and making us laugh. Unlike most diaries, this narrative holds us in suspense, perhaps because we know how he’ll end up — famous — but not how he got there. It’s heartening to know that even famous writers struggle all the time, and with such humor and grace. (Little, Brown and Company, $28)

WHEREAS: Poems, by Layli Long Soldier 
The first word of the first clause of the U.S. government’s Native American Apology Resolution is “whereas,” signaling that whatever follows can not be officially cited as an actionable grievance, since one must “take into consideration that.” Layli Long Soldier’s important poetry collection riffs repeatedly on this word, interrogating it, challenging it, redefining it. Although indigenous history is filled with false apologies and equivocations, this collection of “short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers” stands as a reckoning. (Graywolf Press, $16)

Letters to His Neighbor, by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis 
A new trove of Proust correspondence has been discovered, though fans will have to wait until August to get a taste. Letters to His Neighbor, brilliantly translated by Lydia Davis, is a collection of beseeching letters that Proust wrote to his noisy upstairs neighbor, a dentist. The letters are inadvertently hilarious in their hyper-genteel poise; we see Proust at his most desperate, charming to the extreme, an effect no doubt amplified by Davis’s elegant prose. Proust famously spent the remaining years of his life writing in a cork-lined room, unable to tolerate any kind of noise; these letters endear us to him and his struggle for peace. (New Directions, $23)

Temporary People, by Deepak Unnikrishnan 
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Deepak Unnikrishnan’s story collection is a tour de force. In twenty-eight linked stories, the author illuminates the plight of the countless foreign laborers who toil invisibly under horrific working conditions in the United Arab Emirates. The stories are surreal, Kafkaesque parables: “In Mussafah Grew People” portrays a man growing temporary, disposable workers intended to last only twelve years; in “Birds,” a woman bikes around stitching up men who have fallen from the high rises they’ve built. This is an incredible first collection that shouldn’t be missed. (Restless Books, $18)

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Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Carilda Oliver Labra (1922 - 2018)




Carilda Oliver Labra
(1922 - 2018)



Carilda Oliver Labra (born July 6, 1924) is a Cuban poet who was born in Matanzas. 


Labra studied law at the University of Havana. She is also known to excel at drawing, painting and sculpting. 

Known as one of the most influential Cuban poets, her work has focused on love, the role of women in society, and herself. Oliver Labra has received numerous national and international prizes including the National Poetry Prize (1950), National Literature Award (1997) and the José de Vasconcelos International Prize (2002). Me desordeno, amor, me desordeno might be her most famous poem. Other works such as Discurso de Eva ("Eve's Discourse") also show a profound literary technique. 

Her debut collection in 1943, Lyric Prelude (Preludio lirico) immediately established her as an important poetic voice. At the South of My Throat made her famous: the coveted National Prize for poetry came to her in 1950 as a result of the popular and notorious book, At the South of My Throat (Al sur de mi garganta) 1949. In honor of the tri-centennial of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in a contest sponsored by The Latin American Society in Washington D.C., in 1950, she had also received the national Cuban First Prize for her poems. Her work was highly praised by Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet and first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945. In 1958, Labra published Feverish memory (Memoria de la fiebre) which added to her notoriety as a blatantly erotic woman. The book concerned a theme which has dominated her poetry, which of lost love, as it was written after the unfortunate and untimely death of her second husband.

Carilda Oliver

I Go Crazy 

by Carilda Oliver Labra









I go crazy, my love, I go crazy
when I go in your mouth, delayed;
and almost without wanting, almost for nothing
I touch you with the point of my breast.

I touch you with the tip of my breast
and with my abandoned solitude;
and perhaps without being enamored;
I go crazy, my love, I go crazy.

And my luck of the prized fruit
burns in your salacious and turbid hand
like a bad promise of venom;


though I want to kiss you kneeling,
When I go in your mouth, delayed
I go crazy, my love, I go crazy.





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An Unpublished Hemingway Story Makes Its Debut This Week

Ernest Hemingway
by Mathieu Laca


An Unpublished Hemingway Story Makes Its Debut This Week



By EMILY PRICE
August 2, 2018
A previously unpublished story written by Ernest Hemingway will be making its debut this week in the summer edition of the literary quarterly, Strand Magazine.
The story “A Room on the Garden Side,” is a World War II-era tale that takes place inside the Ritz hotel, The Washington Post reports. Kirk Curnutt, a board member for the Hemingway Society who contributed an afterword for the story in The Strand, said the story “contains all the trademark elements readers love in Hemingway.”
Hemingway is known to have left a number of unpublished works at the time of his suicide in 1961. Other works by the author that have been published after his death include “A Moveable Feast,” “The Garden of Eden,” “Islands in the Stream,” and “The Dangerous Summer.”
Issue 55 of The Strand, which includes Hemingway’s short story, can be purchased from The Strand’s website for $9.99. A three-year subscription to the magazine, including the Hemingway edition, is priced at $49.99.
FORTUNE


Hemingway / Miss Stein fait la leçon

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Michael Connelly's Top Ten List

Michael Connelly
Photo by Miriam Berkley

Michael Connelly's Top Ten List

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Michael Connelly (born 1956) is an American author of detective novels and crime fiction best known for his series featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch and another featuring criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His bestselling books have been translated into dozens of languages. After working for years as crime reporter for several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, he published his first novel, The Black Echo, in 1992, which introduced Bosch. Other novels in the series include The Black Ice (1993),The Closers (2005), The Black Box (2012) and The Burning Room (2014). The Haller series (several of which feature Bosch) includes The Lincoln Lawyer(2005), The Brass Verdict (2008) and The Gods of Guilt (2013). Connelly has won almost every major award given to mystery writers in the United States - including the Edgar Award, Anthony Award, Macavity Award and the Nero Award – and many international awards, including the Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), .38 Caliber Award (France), Grand Prix Award (France) andPremio Bancarella Award (Italy).
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). Perhaps the most searching fable of the American Dream ever written, this glittering novel of the Jazz Age paints an unforgettable portrait of its day — the flappers, the bootleg gin, the careless, giddy wealth. Self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby, determined to win back the heart of the girl he loved and lost, emerges as an emblem for romantic yearning, and the novel’s narrator, Nick Carroway, brilliantly illuminates the post–World War I end to American innocence.

2. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939). Hollywood is not alluring in this savage, apocalyptic novel about fame and its perversions. Painter Tod Hackett comes to Hollywood to design sets and find success. Instead, he finds a population of the physically and psychically maimed crouching at the edges of the film industry, desperately believing that only luck and time separate them from stardom. At the end, their disappointment explodes into violence and Tod sums up his despair with his single great painting: The Burning of Los Angeles.

3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960). Tomboy Scout and her brother Jem are the children of the profoundly decent widower Atticus Finch, a small-town Alabama lawyer defending a black man accused of raping a white woman. Although Tom Robinson’s trial is the centerpiece of this Pulitzer Prize–winning novel —raising profound questions of race and conscience —this is, at heart, a tale about the fears and mysteries of growing up, as the children learn about bravery, empathy, and societal expectations through a series of evocative set pieces that conjure the Depression-era South.

4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962). In Ken Kesey’s first novel, the insane asylum becomes an allegory for the larger world as the patients are roused from their lethargy by the arrival of Randall Patrick McMurphy, a genial, larger than life con man who fakes insanity to get out of a ninety-day prison sentence. By the time McMurphy learns that he is now under the cruel control of Nurse Ratched and the asylum, he has already set the wheels of rebellion in motion. Narrated by Chief Broom Bromden, an Indian who has not spoken in so long he is believed to be deaf and mute, McMurphy’s rebellion is a spectacular foretelling of what the 1960s were to bring.

5. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1962). After flying forty-eight missions, Yossarian, a bomber pilot in World War II, is going crazy trying to find an excuse to be grounded. But the military has a catch, Catch 22, which states, (a) a sane man must fight, unless (b) he can prove he is insane, in which case (a) must apply —for what sane person doesn’t want to avoid fighting? This novel is a congery of appallingly funny, logical, logistical, and mortal horrors. It defined the cultural moment of the 1960s, when black humor became America’s pop idiom.

6. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940). Hemingway’s ambivalence toward war —its nobility and its pointlessness —are delineated in this account of Robert Jordan, an idealistic American professor who enlists with the antifascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Jordan’s idealism is quickly tested by the bloody reality of combat and the cynical pragmatism of his comrades.

7. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953). Chandler’s sardonic and chivalric gumshoe Philip Marlowe winds up in jail when he refuses to betray a client to the Los Angeles police investigating the murder of a wealthy woman. Marlowe’s incorruptibility and concentration on the case are challenged even more when the obsessively independent private eye falls in love, apparently for the first time, with a different rich and sexy woman. She proposes marriage, but he puts her off, claiming he feels “like a pearl onion on a banana split” among her set.

8. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969). Part science fiction, part war story, this is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a former World War II prisoner of war who survived the firebombing of Dresden, as did Vonnegut himself. Abducted by visitors from the planet Trafalmadore, Pilgrim comes “unstuck in time” and is thus able to revisit key points in his life and even his future. Written at the height of the Vietnam War, this muscular satire reveals the absurdity and brutality of modern war.

9. The Public Burning by Robert Coover (1976). It is 1953 and Russian spies are everywhere, according to Fightin’ Joe McCarthy. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are scheduled to fry in the electric chair in Times Square, and Uncle Sam has delegated Vice President Richard Nixon (who narrates much of the story) to ensure that the show goes off. Coover is a master of lingos, from Uncle Sam’s Davy Crockett yawps to Nixon’s resentful Rotarian tones. Oddly, Tricky Dick comes off as a rather endearing soul, a 1950s Everyman helplessly folded, spindled, and mutilated in Coover’s funhouse mirrors.

10. Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain (1941). After shedding her philandering, unemployed husband, Mildred Pierce works menial jobs to support her two children before discovering a gift for making and selling pies in Depression-era California. She’s a strong woman with two fatal flaws —an attraction to weak men and blind devotion to her monstrously selfish daughter Veda. These weaknesses join to form a perfect storm of betrayal and murder in this hard-boiled tale.






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Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Rekindling the Spark / Bio recalls novelist


Muriel Spark


Rekindling the Spark: Bio recalls novelist

Nonfiction: "Muriel Spark: The Biography," by Martin Stannard. MACKENZIE CARPENTER
July 4, 2010

Elegant, macabre, clever, subversive, funny and, these days, mostly forgotten.
Muriel Spark (1918-2006) may be the best post-World War II British novelist people never read any more, remembered mainly as author of "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," her only novel to achieve popular success.
"Memento Mori," "Girls of Slender Means," "The Driver's Seat" and many of her other novels won rave reviews in their day but have faded into obscurity.
With the publication of Martin Stannard's massive new biography, it might be time for a Spark revival, though. Through archives, letters, publications and interviews, he delineates the life of a publicly celebrated writer who was, the author says, "a mistress of disguise and disappearances."
Well before Betty Friedan composed her own 1962 manifesto for female self-determination, Muriel Spark practiced it without apology, with complete confidence in her genius.
When worldwide fame came after "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (which was published in its entirety in The New Yorker), she accepted it as her due, lived large, wore couture, leased fabulous apartments in New York and Rome and had entourages of friends and admirers. (After two dismal love affairs she pretty much abandoned sex although she found late-in-life happiness in an apparently asexual companionship with artist Penelope Jardine.) Yet, always, she was the disciplined writer, indeed, prolific -- 22 novels in all.
Ms. Spark had invited Mr. Stannard to write this book back in 1992 when she read his acclaimed two-volume biography on Evelyn Waugh. It can be an exhausting read, overstuffed with facts about her battles with publishers, editors and journalists.
Famously litigious, Ms. Spark fiercely guarded her privacy, once threatening an injunction when an interviewer wrote she had cooked dinner for Tennessee Williams because, she claimed, all her parties were catered.
Ms. Spark called her fiction "a literature of ridicule" and her shrewdly observed characters are mostly unscrupulous, often stupid, and if they're smart, they're often venal.
Frequently touted as a "Catholic novelist" in the manner of Waugh and Graham Greene (two friends who strongly supported her during her early years as a literally starving writer), her Catholicism was selective; she disdained popes and sermons and supported birth control, but in spare, exacting prose, was always preoccupied with matters of the soul -- self-sacrifice, original sin.
Born Muriel Camberg into a middle-class family in Edinburgh, Ms. Spark was half Jewish, which may have accounted for her divided personality -- a workaholic who craved solitude (she'd sometimes check herself into a private hospital so she could write without being disturbed).
She also loved the limelight, as long as she controlled it. A vivacious redhead, she enjoyed being admired by men, but mocked them after they would leave the room.
Mr. Stannard goes to great lengths to defend her behavior, which could be selfish and cruel, most notably in her treatment of her son, Robin, her only child from a disastrous early marriage to a man who abused her during seven miserable years in Africa.
Let's face it, she could be monstrous, but Muriel Spark's life is worth reading, and if any good comes from this book, it will mean her novels are read again.
But you'll have to order them online. A recent visit to a large chain bookstore revealed many Sparks (Nicholas) on the shelf under "S" but only one small singular Spark -- the "Brodie" book. Depressing.



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