Lynn Munroe / Tom Miller

TOM MILLER

By Lynn Munroe

Paperback cover artist and painter Thomas John Miller was born in Midland, Ontario in Canada on July 26, 1913. He remained a Canadian citizen for most of his life. Tom's parents died when he was still a young man and he was raised by two aunts who lived down near the American border. The aunts left Tom alone, free to roam and experience the world, and he crisscrossed back and forth over the border as he grew up. Tom realized he had absolutely no one to rely on except himself. As a result, he became fiercely independent. He took care of himself. This independent nature remained with him all his life and he grew up to become a meticulous and independent artist, answering only to his own very high standards.  He never had an agent or manager, always represented himself.

Lynn Munroe / Tom Miller and Me

 

 

Tom Miller and Me

My love affair with the paperback cover art of Tom Miller is such that I can still recall exactly where I was the first time I ever noticed Tom Miller's artist credit on a vintage paperback. I was standing in one of the meeting rooms of the Grosnevor Hotel, adjoining Victoria Station in London. I was there attending the First British Paperback Fair as the guest of Mr. Peter Chapman, who in those days put on the show with Mr. Maurice Flanagan of Zardoz Books. One of the young Brits there shared my love of flashy and outrageous American paperback cover art, and he handed me a copy of Monarch 189, CAMPUS DOLL by Edwin West. And I still remember seeing that book 24 years later. In the mail order book catalog I was sending out in those pre-internet days, I later wrote that my first glimpse of CAMPUS DOLL had caused me to fall to the floor and spin about like Curly of the Three Stooges. And while that was not actually literally true, I did feel something like that inside.

Margaret Atwood / Our Cat Goes to Heaven

 

Our Cat Goes to Heaven

---

MARGARET ATWOOD

Our cat was raptured up to heaven. He’d never liked heights, so he tried to sink his claws into whatever invisible snake, giant hand, or eagle was causing him to rise in this manner, but he had no luck.

When he got to heaven, it was a large field. There were a lot of little pink things running around that he thought at first were mice. Then he saw God sitting in a tree. Angels were flying around with fluttering white wings; they were making sounds like doves. Every once in a while, God would reach out with its large furry paw and snatch one of them out of the air and crunch it up. The ground under the tree was littered with bitten-off angel wings.

Our cat went politely over to the tree.

Meow, said our cat.

Meow, said God. Actually it was more like a roar.

I always thought you were a cat, said our cat, but I wasn’t sure.

In heaven all things are revealed, said God. This is the form in which I choose to appear to you.

I’m glad you aren’t a dog, said our cat. Do you think I could have my testicles back?

Of course, said God. They’re over behind that bush.

Our cat had always known his testicles must be somewhere. One day he’d woken up from a fairly bad dream and found them gone. He’d looked everywhere for them—under sofas, under beds, inside closets—and all the time, they were here, in heaven! He went over to the bush, and sure enough, there they were. They reattached themselves immediately.

Our cat was very pleased. Thank you, he said to God.

God was washing its elegant long whiskers. De rien, said God.

Would it be possible for me to help you catch some of those angels? said our cat.

You never liked heights, said God, stretching itself out along the branch, in the sunlight. I forgot to say there was sunlight.

True, said our cat. I never did. (He preferred to forget an episode with a fireman and a ladder.) Well, how about some of those mice?

They aren’t mice, said God. But catch as many as you like. Don’t kill them right away. Make them suffer.

You mean, play with them? said our cat. I used to get in trouble for that.

It’s a question of semantics, said God. You won’t get in trouble for that here.

Our cat chose to ignore this remark, as he did not know what “semantics” was. He did not intend to make a fool of himself. If they aren’t mice, what are they? he said. Already, he’d pounced on one. He held it down under his paw. It was kicking and uttering tiny shrieks.

They’re the souls of human beings who have been bad on earth, said God, half-closing its yellowy-green eyes. Now, if you don’t mind, it’s time for my nap.

What are they doing in heaven then? said our cat.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

BRICK

Erle Stanley Gardner / Cool and Lam

Cool and Lam

  

Erle Stanley Gardner was a prolific dynamo. In addition to writing 85 best-selling Perry Mason books over five decades, he also wrote hundreds of great pulp magazine stories and – under the pen name A.A. Fair - a series of hardboiled crime stories about the Cool & Lam Detective Agency. Big Bertha Cool figures most men will never call a woman for a private eye job, so she lists her business as B. Cool Detective Agency. When disbarred lawyer / wunderkind Donald Lam comes to work for her, nothing is ever the same again. It has been suggested that Gardner wrote the Cool & Lam books as a break from the more laid back respectable world of his slick serialized Perry Mason stories. Cool & Lam mysteries are down and dirty, great fun to read, filled with lots of humor. They have their loyal fans, and I am one of them.

The 100 best fantasy books of all time / My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

 

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

OCTOBER 15, 2020 7:54 AM EDT

In 1954, the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola published My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, uniquely synthesizing the Yoruba culture he was born into with that of the British and Christian colonialism under which he matured into adulthood. The book, Tutuola’s second, tells the story of a west African child who is forced for 24 years to navigate an incomprehensible wilderness filled with fantastical beings, most of whom are, as the title suggests, some form of ghost. It’s a striking work of syncretism, recontextualizing previously unrecorded west African mythology by imbuing it with symbols of what was at the time a new global modernity. Consider, for example, one of the key figures of the novel: the “television-handed ghostess,” who convinces the narrator to follow the sorcerers’ advice and lick his open wound—by opening her hands and revealing TV screens on her palms showing footage of the narrator’s family and home village. Tutuola would go on to inspire Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and superproducer Brian Eno to record a 1981 album by the same title as this book; it’s a testament to his impact, as arguably the first international artist to form a new language by sampling the folk traditions of the global south and the modern imagery of the industrialized West.

—Elijah Wolfson

TIME

The 100 best fantasy books of all time / The Palma-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

 

The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

OCTOBER 15, 2020 7:54 AM EDT

I

n 1950, Amos Tutuola, a 30-year-old Nigerian, read a magazine and decided he could write too. He drafted what would become The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and sent it as a response to a “manuscripts wanted” ad put out by Lutheran World Press, a Christian publisher. A year later, Faber & Faber, one of the preeminent publishers of English literature, sent him a letter inquiring about publishing it. Soon after, it appeared in print across the U.K. and the U.S. At the time, it was unlike anything English-language readers had ever seen; even today, it’s bracingly original in its voice and ideas. The story’s protagonist and narrator is an alcoholic with God-like thirst and resilience: He drinks 225 kegs of palm wine a day, and that is all he does. The inciting incident of the novel is that his “tapster” dies, and there is no longer anyone to get him all the palm wine he desires. So, the narrator sets off to seek the Deads’ Town, where he believes he can find his tapster, now in his post-life form, and bring him back to his village so he can return to his life of drinking transcendent amounts of booze. Along the way is a sort of picaresque of the grotesque, where the narrator encounters monsters, (mostly malicious) magical beings and all sorts of incarnations of death and destruction. Tutuola, writing at a moment when the Yoruba culture he was born into was colliding with that of British Colonialism and Christian proselytism, weaves in aspects of the new West African modernity with Yoruba myth and oral storytelling so seamlessly you could blink and miss it. And the language, too, feels unique to the moment: Tutuola uses the Colonial British he learned in Anglican school to create a more propulsive and energetic version of English to tell the stories of Western Africa. 

—Elijah Wolfson

TIME

The 100 best fantasy books of all time / Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory

 

Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory

OCTOBER 15, 2020 7:54 AM EDT

One of the earliest printed works of the fantasy genre can be found in the 15th century’s Le Morte d’Arthur, French for “the death of Arthur.” The book, published in 1485 by Sir Thomas Malory (whose authorship remains disputed), is a collection of stories, myths and folklore surrounding the exploits of King Arthur, who supposedly defended Britain from Saxon invaders in the 5th or 6th century C.E. These stories, which are retellings, reimaginings or consolidations of oral tradition and disparate epic poems, contain classic tales including Arthur receiving Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake and the Knights of the Round Table’s search for the Holy Grail. Through it all, the supernatural that lies hidden in the known world, the magic of Merlin and the threat of French giants ground the work in fantasy. Unfortunately, the misogyny and bigotry of the era is on display throughout; it dehumanizes Muslim characters, and when women aren’t marginalized, they’re often presented as antagonists. Le Morte d’Arthur is important to the genre for its longevity, and has gone on to inspire all manner of artists, from Monty Python to Stephen King. This book, with its disputed authorship and patchwork of long-told stories, also stands as a testament to how the fantasy genre has always evolved. This 500-year-old text mixed and matched its parts from the work of many, all while creating new perspectives and using fantastical themes to explain human existence, in the same way that the genre continues today. 

—Peter Allen Clark

TIME

The 100 best fantasy books of all time / The Arabian Nights

 

The Arabian Nights

Nearly everyone is familiar with this collection of folktales, also known as One Thousand and One Nights, and its infamous framing device: Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter, is set to be married and then killed by the king; she forestalls this destiny by convincing the king to hear a story, which she then draws out for 1,001 nights by ending each evening on a cliffhanger. (In other words, Scheherazade invented narrative television.) It’s hard to ignore that, from the start, this book of short stories is deeply misogynistic; the problematic gender dynamics of its time are pervasive and often stomach churning. And it’s rife with racism toward dark-skinned Africans and casual discrimination of Jews. It’s also impossible to ignore the tremendous influence on storytelling these tales have had, far beyond the Islamic Golden Age in which they were initially compiled—the earliest known printed page dates back to the 9th century. There are stories within stories (within stories, sometimes); there are unreliable narrators; there is foreshadowing; there are plot twists. There are tales of horror, crime, sci-fi and, of course, fantasy. (There is not, as pop culture has led us to believe, a tale of Aladdin, nor of Ali Baba and the thieves.) Without The Arabian Nights—and its genies, sea monsters, automata with life breathed into them, demons commingling with humans and more—it’s hard to imagine certain elements of works by H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, Jorge Louis Borges, A.S. Byatt, Edgar Allan Poe and the entire comic book industry, just to name a few. While there have been many editions and translations of The Arabian Nights, Mushin Mahdi’s 1984 Arabic-language edition and Husain Haddawy’s corresponding 1990 English translation are among the most celebrated. 

—Elijah Wolfson

TIME

Céline jumpsuit, $3,250, (212) 535-3703.Credit...
Photograph by Paolo Roversi. Styled by Jonathan Kaye

Charlotte Rampling’s Unknowable Truth

For more than 50 years, the actress has seduced men and women alike with her cool, distant beauty. But what if all that time we were wrong?

Charlotte Rampling’s reputation doesn’t entirely make sense. She is an actress of extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity, with a rare, charismatic beauty and sexual force that has lasted well into her 60s. Her career began at 17, when she was spotted in a secretarial pool by an ad man who worked upstairs; she went with enchanted speed from a bit actor in a Cadbury commercial to full-on celebrity in 1966 with the modish hit ‘‘Georgy Girl.’’ Over the last half-century, she has made more than a hundred films and TV shows, a career now crowned by Andrew Haigh’s ‘‘45 Years,’’ an emotional tour de force reminiscent of James Joyce’s ‘‘The Dead’’ (the story, not the Huston film) in its quiet, quotidian pace and evocation of the past’s devastating romantic power. Rampling has been rightly celebrated for her remarkable body of work, but she’s also been labeled as ‘‘cold,’’ ‘‘imperious,’’ ‘‘detached,’’ ‘‘watchful,’’ ‘‘hard to get close to,’’ ‘‘mysterious’’ and ‘‘aloof.’’ In the countless interviews she’s done, reporters have described her with a mixture of awe and anxiety, sometimes casting her as a bit of a mental case as they unknowingly behave like mental cases themselves.

The Night Porter: Nazi porn or daring arthouse eroticism?

There were bids to ban this film about a sexual liaison between an SS officer and a teenage concentration camp prisoner. As it returns four decades on, does director Liliana Cavani still feel their relationship was ‘beautiful’?

 

Ryan Gilbey
Thu 26 November 2020

M

ovie romances traditionally have what’s called a “meet cute”, that clinching moment when a couple-to-be first bump into one another. It would be hard, though, to think of a meet less cute than the one in The Night Porter, Liliana Cavani’s erotic drama from 1974. When Max (Dirk Bogarde) encounters Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), they are in a concentration camp: he is an SS commandant and she is his teenage prisoner, crop-haired, ghostly and gaunt. A twisted relationship develops. She gives him sex and he brings her gifts, such as the head of a fellow prisoner in a box. It’s the little things that mean so much.

Twelve years after the end of the war, they are reunited when she checks into the Vienna hotel where he is manning the front desk. Soon it’s like the good old days all over again: they play sadomasochistic sex games, and Max tries to prevent Lucia being killed by his Nazi chums.

Charlotte Rampling: ‘My career has been sort of marginal ...’ 

Charlotte Rampling: ‘Depression makes you dead to the world – you've got to build yourself up again’

The actor on her new film, Hannah, 2016’s ‘racism’ row, her silence on #MeToo and learning to care for herself

Rebecca Nicholson

Friday 1 March 2019

Charlotte Rampling is sorry for being late. She arrived at Gare du Nord in time to catch her train from Paris to London, but when she got there, she realised she had left her passport at home. She has just moved, she explains, to a new place in Paris, the city in which she has lived for decades, and nothing is where she expects it to be.

“When you move, it’s quite disorienting. You don’t quite know where you are.” Not that she is in any way ruffled by the train fiasco. It is hard to imagine her being ruffled by anything. She needs a minute to put her bags down, she says, as she checks in at the hotel, then I should come up to her room and we can talk. She puts on her sunglasses and disappears into the lift.

 

Charlotte Rampling

Hannah review – quietly haunting portrait of an upturned life

In this often wordless drama, Charlotte Rampling brings an intelligent intensity to the role of a woman whose ageing husband has been jailed

Peter Bradshaw

Thu 7 February 2019

E

xperiencing the formal, compositional chill of this film is like opening the door of a freezer cabinet and putting your head inside. The Italian film-maker Andrea Pallaoro directs and co-writes, and the star is Charlotte Rampling, whose performance won her the Volpi cup for best actress at the Venice film festival two years ago. It is the portrait of a lonely, unhappy life and the action is almost wordless, in a series of scenes often recorded by fixed camera positions that (for a while) withhold from the audience the full truth of what is happening. It is perhaps inspired by Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Au Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

How The Queen's Gambit became Netflix's unlikeliest hit of the year

The glossy series on an orphaned girl’s inexorable rise to chess stardom is now the streamer’s most-watched scripted limited series of all time

Adrian Horton
Thu 26 November 2020

I

f you were to pick, at first glance, the television hit of fall 2020, it would probably not be The Queen’s Gambit. The lush seven-part Netflix miniseries from Godless creator Scott Frank and Allan Scott, released in October, doesn’t contain the obvious genre components or zaniness of a runaway Netflix hit. It’s the adaptation of a well-reviewed if not widely known 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, a cold war period piece about an orphaned girl who is adept at chess – a cerebral and certainly high-stakes game, but not an activity renowned for its visual drama.

And yet, as of this week The Queen’s Gambit is Netflix’s most-watched scripted limited series to date – a slightly convoluted and dubious record, given that Netflix measures a “view” as anything more than two minutes of content, but still, attracting 62 million account viewers during its first month is an impressive feat. (For comparison, Tiger King, the docuseries on America’s private exotic zoos that blew up at the outset of quarantine, drew 64 million account viewers in its first month.)

How to explain the surprising dominance of a period miniseries about one girl’s inexorable rise to the heights of international chess prestige? For anyone who’s fallen into it – and with the entire show released at once mere weeks before a bruising and protracted US election, The Queen’s Gambit was ripe binge material – the answer is in the immersion. The Queen’s Gambit is grade-A escapism: a classic sports underdog story injected with Netflix capital, an uncomplicated pleasure of sumptuous, meticulous styling, a soothing portal into another world which believes in talent as the one invincible currency.

The Queen’s Gambit plays, especially in its early episodes, as a matured rendition of classic, beloved Roald Dahl coming-of-age stories. Orphaned at age nine by a car crash, Beth Harmon (played in the first episode by Isla Johnston) is sent to the barren Methuen Home for Girls in Kentucky; lonely save for one fellow orphan, Jolene (Moses Ingraham), and plied with tranquilizers, Beth hides out in a dingy basement and befriends the gruff janitor Mr Shaibel (Bill Camp), who introduces her to chess. Her prodigious skill is undeniable, her consumption by chess whole – by day, she schools Mr Shaibel, inhaling lessons echoed throughout the rest of the series; by night, she envisions boards and maneuvers upside-down on the ceiling, her mind an endlessly capable expanse.

Anya Taylor-Joy / Beth Harmon / The Queen's Gambit

Anya Taylor-Joy

BETH HARMON

THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT

 

The family in 1960: wife Jamie Tevis, daughter Julia Tevis (McGory), author Walter Tevis, and son Will holding a friend. (All photos courtesy the Tevis Estate)

Another Look takes on Walter Tevis’s “Queen’s Gambit.” And the author’s son remembers playing chess with dad.

On January 29, Another Look will hold its winter event to discuss The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis. The event will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 29, in the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall on the Stanford campus. (Update: podcast of the event is here.)

Author Walter Tevis is best known for his three novels that were turned into major films: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Tevis was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Sunset District. While his parents relocated to Kentucky, he spent a year in the Stanford Children’s Convalescent Home (which later became Stanford’s Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital). Hence, Another Look’s winter event will be a homecoming for the author, who died in 1984. 

Can chess making a gripping film? / Watch Walter Tevis’s “Queen’s Gambit” on Netflix

 

Anya Taylor-Joy
The Quee´s Gambit

Can chess making a gripping film? Watch Walter Tevis’s “Queen’s Gambit” on Netflix this Friday, October 23

Tuesday, October 20th, 2020

Last year, Stanford’s “Another Look” – a public events series that focuses on forgotten, out-of-the-way, overlooked books – sponsored an event on Walter Tevis’ Queen’s Gambit. The idea came from Another Look’s founding director, the eminent American author Tobias Wolff, always a keen watcher of American fiction. It turned out to be one of our most popular selections ever. Thanks to the cooperation of Tevis’s daughter, Julia Tevis McGory, we published a number of photographs on the Another Look website, and even a mini-memoir from son Will Tevis  about playing chess with his father here.  The January 29, 2019, panel featured Tobias Wolff, Robert Pogue Harrison, and Inga Pierson.

Walter Tevis / Book vs Movie / The Hustler

Book vs Movie: The Hustler

Jim Cherry

February 22, 2018

“The Hustler” was written by Walter Tevis and published in 1959 to a good critical response and with Tevis being compared favorably to Hemingway. “The Hustler” quickly made its way to Hollywood with a film version was released in September 1961.

The Real Hustler

Expand

The Real Hustler

Gary P. West

October 1, 2019

No one in Carlisle knew when the new high school English teacher showed up in 1952 what that teacher's future might hold. In spite of an Ichabod Crane look and often ill-fitting clothes, Walter Tevis became popular in the community. Shortly after coming to the school, he met Jamie Griggs, a recent graduate of Eastern Kentucky University and home economics teacher who also was new there.

Walter Tevis / The Man Who Brought ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ to Life

The Man Who Brought ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ to Life

Walter Tevis, the author of the book upon which the Netflix hit is based, spent his life gambling and drinking in pool halls before turning to chess. But once you know his story, it’s stunning that the book ever came out at all.

By David Hill  Nov 9, 2020, 8:27am EST

“They“They say you’re the real thing,” says a reporter from Life magazine in Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit. The “real thing” she is addressing is the book’s protagonist, a 13-year-old chess prodigy named Beth Harmon who just won the Kentucky State chess championship—a remarkable feat not only because of her age but, at the time, her gender. The interviewer prods her to talk about chess as a sport: how she is competitive, how she “plays to win,” how she is “out for blood.”