Sunday, January 31, 2021

Twisted brilliance / Patricia Highsmith at 100

Author Patricia Highsmith at home, in 1977. Photograph: Liselotte Erben

Twisted brilliance: Patricia Highsmith at 100

Forbidden desires, strange obsessions and a singular talent for suspense... Carmen Maria Machado on the dark allure of the writer behind Ripley

Carmen Maria Machado

Saturday 9 January 2021

here has always been something fundamentally difficult about Patricia Highsmith. And not difficult in the way that most people mean it: ironic, quirky, feminist (“Well-behaved women rarely make history”, and so on). I mean truly, legitimately difficult; a well of darkness with no discernible bottom.

Which is not to say that she wasn’t, in her own way, endearing. She was, after all, a genius, a bona fide eccentric. She loved animals, particularly snails, which she kept by the hundred as pets and took to parties clinging to a leaf of lettuce in her handbag. Writer and critic Terry Castle describes how she once “smuggled her cherished pet snails through French customs by hiding six or eight of them under each bosom”. She was famous for her wit and wicked sense of humour, and she wrote compellingly of loneliness and empathetically about disempowered housewives and children.

Diaries expose ‘strong brew’ of Ripley novelist Patricia Highsmith’s dark thoughts

Controversial views of the late American writer to be revealed by publication of her private notebooks

Edward Helmore in New York
Sat 26 Oct 2019 17.01 BST

It promises to be one of the literary highlights of 2021 – publication of the diaries of Patricia Highsmith, one of the most conflicted, fascinating novelists of the 20th century.

Highsmith, who died in 1995 having written a series of psychological thrillers, including The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train and the romance The Price of Salt, left two sets of diaries hidden in a linen closet in her home in Ticino, Switzerland.

Patricia Highsmith 100 years on review: “she was a sexual predator, a liar and a sadist”

Graham Greene called her “the poet of apprehension”, she fathomed the dark places of the human mind with unequalled intensity, but according to this sensationalist biography, Highsmith was also loutish and insane

Ian Thomson

18 January 2021

atricia Highsmith, the doyenne of the psychological suspense novel, was born in Texas one hundred years ago this January. Her five Ripley thrillers – the so-called “Ripliad” – are among the most disturbing books ever written. Few writers fathomed with such intensity the dark places of the human mind. Tom Ripley, with his social envy and bouts of self-loathing, is at times quite a charming psychopath. Highsmith’s fiction, a marvel of taut, luminous prose, unsettles by its refusal to judge the amoral Ripleys of this world. Highsmith was the “the poet of apprehension”, said Graham Greene.

Patricia Highsmith / The Simple Art of Murder

Patricia Highsmith

The Simple Art of Murder

By Susannah Clapp
December 13, 1999

The murder reﬂected in a pair of spectacles, the merry-go-round that whirls out of control, the hand waving through the grille of a drain. Everyone who has seen the classic Hitchcock film of Patricia Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train” can call up one of its disturbing images. The 1951 movie transformed the fortunes of a young writer, who was still in her twenties when the book—her first novel—was published. But Hitchcock, in bringing the story to the screen, neutered it. Highsmith’s novel puts forward an outrageous proposition—that a psychopath can persuade a clean-cut, law-abiding stranger that each of them should kill on behalf of the other. And it proceeds to prove that this is not only feasible but inevitable: both men go on to commit murder. In the Hitchcock version, however, only the psychopath kills. Memorable though the film is, it pulls back from the novel’s most disturbing implications to become, at bottom, another Hollywood good-guy, bad-guy story.

Illustration by Andrea Ucini

The World's Champion Ball-Bouncer by Patricia Highsmith – a brilliant story unseen for 73 years

In this previously uncollected short story by The Talented Mr Ripley author, a young girl struggles to adjust to life in New York

Patricia Highsmith
Saturday 9 January 2021

“Ellie, eat your breakfast,” Elspeth’s mother said from behind her, in the kind of voice she used when she was thinking about something else. “Just look how thick the cream is this morning.”

The Snail-Watcher

by Patricia Highsmith

When Mr Peter Knoppert began to make a hobby of snail-watching, he had no idea that his handful of specimens would become hundreds in no time. Only two months after the original snails were carried up to the Knoppert study, some thirty glass tanks and bowls, all teeming with snails, lined the walls, rested on the desk and windowsills, and were beginning even to cover the floor. Mrs Knoppert disapproved strongly, and would no longer enter the room. It smelled, she said, and besides she had once stepped on a snail by accident, a horrible sensation she would never forget. But the more his wife and friends deplored his unusual and vaguely repellent pastime, the more pleasure Mr Knoppert seemed to find in it.

Ten Writing Tips by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates
Photo by Bella Newman

10 Writing Tips

Joyce Carol Oates

Write your heart out.
The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.
You are writing for your contemporaries not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.
Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun. (This is Raymond Chandler's advice, not mine. I would not try this.)
Unless you are experimenting with form gnarled, snarled, & obscure be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.
Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!
Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader or any reader. He/she might exist but is reading someone else.
Read, observe, listen intensely! as if your life depended upon it.
Write your heart out.

Joyce Carol Oates / Two Quotes

Joyce Carol Oates
by David Levine

TWO QUOTES

by Joyce Carol Oates

Age and Aging

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

Men and Women

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.

15 Famous Authors Ask Joyce Carol Oates Anything

15 Famous Authors Ask
Joyce Carol Oates Anything

By InterviewSeptember 6, 2018

If there are any living authors in the running for the title of master American storyteller, Joyce Carol Oates is surely on the shortlist. The 80-year-old writer has become something of a byword for prolificacy—and rightfully so, as she has published 149 books—and yet rarely is it mentioned what a staggering variety of literary genres she’s tackled. It’s impossible to think of another author who has thrived in writing romance, crime, horror, historical biography (notably, her stunning retelling of Marilyn Monroe’s life in her 29th novel, Blonde), the suburban domestic, the small-town tragedy, mythical allegory, fantasy—the list goes on. This fall, Oates adds dystopian science fiction to her pantheon with her latest novel, Hazards of Time Travel (Ecco). In this wildly inventive tale bouncing between past and future, a free-spirited young thinker in a techno-militant, totalitarian version of the United States of America is convicted of “treason-speech” for asking basic historical questions. As punishment, she is sent back to the idyllic world of a 1950s Wisconsin college town for “re-education.”

Red Island House by Andrea Lee / People do mysterious things

RED ISLAND HOUSE

by Andrea Lee

From National Book Award–nominated writer Andrea Lee comes a gorgeously evocative epic about love, clashing cultures, and identity, set in the tropical African island nation of Madagascar.

“People do mysterious things when they think they’ve found paradise,” reflects Shay, the heroine of Red Island House. When Shay, a Black American professor who’s always had an adventurous streak, marries Senna, an Italian businessman, she doesn’t imagine that her life’s greatest adventure will carry her far beyond their home in Milan to an idyllic stretch of beach in Madagascar, where Senna builds a flamboyant vacation villa. Before she knows it, Shay has become the somewhat reluctant mistress of a sprawling household, caught between her privileged American upbringing and her connection to the continent of her ancestors.

Illustration by Marc Aspinal

But I’ve Got Ovid

A Duck, Miami, and the Fantasy Life

By Jane Alison

After thirty years of disaster with men and fresh from a spanking-new heartbreak, I’m back in Miami, back in my dilapidated condo in paradise, to decide if it’s time to retire from love.

Even my mother thinks I should. When I called to tell her of the latest disaster, she sighed and said, Maybe, darling, you should give up on all that. Maybe it’s just time.

Okay, I’ve got other loves, after all. My broken-down mother. My blind old cat. A love poet who’s been dead two thousand years whose words I’m being paid to translate. A friend or two via text.

Staff Picks / Land Mines, Laugh Tracks, and Ladies in Satin

JOAN DIDION. PHOTO: BRIGITTE LACOMBE.

Staff Picks: Land Mines,

Laugh Tracks, and Ladies

in Satin

January 12, 2021

Joan Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean had me from the title: words can be hair-trigger things, to deploy them is to find oneself surrounded somehow by land mines, and despite the best of efforts and intentions, what one meant seems almost never to come through cleanly. So how does Joan Didion do it? Her words are still weapons, but the diamond-encrusted kind, as beautiful as they are deadly, and, more important, they are entirely at her command. Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of essays spanning essentially the last third of the twentieth century, is a tiny jewel box of a book, and you could read it for the prose alone—no one places a so like Joan Didion—but the real magic is that she pulls it off: she tells you what she means, and every injury is on purpose. There is a generosity to that, I think, and it feels like a gift just to understand what someone else meant even if one cannot hope to return the favor. —Hasan Altaf

Fear Factors

On the Psychology of Safety and Danger

By Veronique Greenwood

When I moved to China nearly two years ago, one of the first things I bought was a bicycle. I live on a university campus, where everyone rides, and the bike was cheap: $17 for an ancient Five Rams cruiser, with a lively color scheme of teal and rust. I used to cycle to work when I lived in New York, dodging tourists and threading in between delivery trucks. But the moment I pulled out onto a street in China, it became clear that this was going to be a different experience.

Insane Places

On Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet

By Elisa Gabbert
January 21, 2021

In 1973, the psychologist David Rosenhan published a paper in the journal Science called “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” The paper was based on an experiment he had conducted, sometimes called the Thud Experiment, designed to interrogate how we distinguish the sane from the insane, if in fact sanity and insanity are distinguishable states. Rosenhan arranged to have eight “pseudopatients” seek voluntary admission to a psychiatric hospital. The instigating complaint was of auditory hallucinations: the patients claimed to hear voices saying the words empty, hollow, and thud. All eight were admitted into psychiatric wards, most with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Blutch / American Dreaming

Blutch

American Dreaming

Although he is fixated on American culture, French cartoonist Blutch is not widely known in English-speaking countries. Blutch is admired and influential for his daring draughtsmanship and ceaseless innovation of his bandes dessinées. He was born Christian Hincker in 1967 in Strasbourg, France. He would go on to win the Grand Prix in Angoulême in 2009. With Peplum, one of his masterworks, newly translated from New York Review Comics (below). it’s the right time to talk to this acclaimed, ever-challenging creator.

Paul Gravett:
Why did you choose the name Blutch?

Blutch:
I didn’t really choose this name, which is not so much a pseudonym as a nickname. Everybody has called me this since I was 15. It’s the name of a character from a popular comic at the time [The Blue Tunics by Lambil & Cauvin, in English from Cinebook]. My friends thought I resembled Blutch, in physique and attitude. Originally, it came from the rather puerile wish to cut yourself from your background, your parents, to be reborn as someone different. And then the nom-de-plume is a tradition in comics since the 19th century, in Europe at least, like Hergé and Moebius.

PEPLUM

by Blutch

Translated from the French by Edward Gauvin

The man known as Blutch is one of the giants of contemporary comics, and Peplum may be his masterpiece: a grand, strange dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way toward Rome—seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels.

Thrilling and hallucinatory, vast in scope yet unnervingly intimate, Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and the Satyricon along with Blutch’s own distinctive vision. His hypnotic storytelling and stark, gorgeous art pull us into one of the great works of graphic literature, translated into English for the first time.

LOOK

From Peplum

By Blutch

April 12, 2016

Blutch’s Peplum, a graphic novel, is out this month from New York Review Comics. A phantasmagoric take on the Satyricon, it was originally serialized in the French magazine À suivre in 1996; this is its first appearance in English. In his new introduction, Blutch’s translator, Edward Gauvin, writes, “Taking as its title the European term for the sword-and-sandal cinematic subgenre, Peplum offers a decidedly different take on the toga epic—one of aporia and ambiguity, a fractured tale of antiquity in all its alien majesty.”

I Want You

By Blutch

April 10, 2020

Originally serialized between 1996 and 1999, Blutch’s comic Mitchum plays host to the legendary French cartoonist’s virtuosic range. Modulating from harried pen work on one page to lush, blocky tableaux on the next, he sorts through the surreal stew of his subconscious in dreamlike episodes, mixing in bits of American pop culture along the way—including, at one point, a sinister, lascivious Jimmy Stewart lurking in the shroud of a detective’s trench coat. “Mitchum was my laboratory at a certain point,” Blutch said in a 2016 interview with the journalist Paul Gravett. “Every kind of experiment was permitted. Their success or failure were secondary.” This week, New York Review Comics released the first complete English translation of Mitchum. An excerpt appears below.

Jim Shepard / Boys Town

BOYS TOWN
By Jim Shepard

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

Here’s the story of my life: whatever I did wasn’t good enough, anything I figured out I figured out too late, and whenever I tried to help I made things worse. That’s what it’s been like for me as far back as I can remember. Whenever I was about to get somewhere, something would step in and block me. Whenever I was about to finally have something, something would happen to take it away.

‘Alcatraz’

A Story by Leanne Shapton

She looked me in the eye and said, “This is a true story.” We were at a dinner party, a casual one in someone’s enormous, expensively fitted kitchen. She had come alone, was recently divorced. I’d met her before, but we’d never really spoken or found common ground. I’d always thought she was chilly. When we were sat next to each other at dinner and got to talking about books and people we both knew, I realized her shyness was the blurry, foggy kind—reserved, but not cold.

Legs

By Libby Flores

hey sat on the linoleum floor, the two of them. His watch was the only thing moving. Through the small window above the sink the rising sun was bleaching the room white. The sound of a garbage truck, a man calling his dog, newspapers hitting doorsteps. Her long, bare legs were out in front of her, knees like turned down saucers. He loved her legs. Something he’d miss. Their backs on the kitchen cabinets, his arm so close to hers. They were tired, but more thirsty. A glass of water would change things, she thought, if he would just get up and get a glass of water.

Libby Flores is a 2008 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road Magazine,The Rattling Wall, CODA Quarterly, and FLASH: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. She is the program manager at PEN Center USA’s Emerging Voices Fellowship.

THE GUARDIAN

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Some Zombie Contingency Plans by Kelly Link

Some Zombie Contingency Plans

by Kelly Link

This is a story about being lost in the woods.

This guy Soap is at a party out in the suburbs. The thing you need to know about Soap is that he keeps a small framed oil painting in the trunk of his car. The painting is about the size of a paperback novel. Wherever Soap goes, this oil painting goes with him. But he leaves the painting in the trunk of his car, because you don’t walk around a party carrying a painting. People will think you’re weird.

Soap doesn’t know anyone here. He’s crashed the party, which is what he does now, when he feels lonely. On weekends, he just drives around the suburbs until he finds one of those summer twilight parties that are so big that they spill out onto the yard.

Kelly Link

Q&A: Kelly Link, Holly Black, and Cassandra Clare

by Kelly Link, February 9, 2015 3:16 PM

In a joint social media call-out, authors Kelly Link, Holly Black, and Cassandra Clare invited readers to ask them anything they wanted. Below are some of those questions and responses.

Q: Where do you get inspiration for your characters?

Kelly Link: Karen Joy Fowler has said that, ideally, writers should lead boring lives and have interesting friends. I don't necessarily steal directly, but there have been times when someone tells a story about something that happened to them, or to a friend, and it's sparked an idea. For example, my sister told me about a friend who went to a wedding, stayed at a B&B, and had a disconcerting encounter with a piece of taxidermy which was making a lot of noise. I thought about that for years, and it ended up in a story called "The Lesson." Once you have a story idea, you begin to think about the ways that different kinds of people might behave, given a certain set of circumstances. I like to imagine: what a character would like other people to think about her, what kind of thing they might not want anyone to know about themselves, what they want, what most irritates them about their family, etc.

Kelly Link / Books that changed me

Books that changed me: Kelly Link

April 15, 2015

Kelly Link is the author of the story collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, The Wrong Grave, Pretty Monsters and most recently Get In Trouble (Text Publishing). Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Link is the co-founder of Small Beer Press. She was born in Miami, Florida and lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Norse Myths

A life in books: Author Kelly Link. CREDIT:SHARONA JACOBS

The first book I ever bought for myself and with my own money (at a jumble sale). Loki was, of course, my favourite. Don't we all love someone who breaks the rules of how the story is supposed to go?

Beloved

Toni Morrison

Look, this is the great American novel. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, the most beautiful and terrible book (and ghost story) I've ever read.

Carmen Dog
Carol Emshwiller

A battle of the sexes novel in which animals begin to turn into women, and women turn into animals. A wife becomes a wolverine. A dog yearns to sing opera at the Metropolitan. Mad scientists! A book I was so crazy about that I eventually republished it through the small press that I run with my husband.

The Collected Stories
Grace Paley

I would love Paley's stories for their first sentences alone: "There once were two husbands disappointed by eggs." These are the truest, funniest, most hard-headed stories that I know about families and marriages, love and class.

THE SIDNEY MORNING HERALD