James Salter in The New Yorker

James Salter

James Salter
 BIOGRAPHY

in The New Yorker

BY DAVID HAGLUND

JUNE 20, 2015

The writer James Salter died on Friday in Sag Harbor, New York. He was ninety years old. Perhaps best known for his 1967 novel, “A Sport and a Pastime,” he had a reputation, as Nick Paumgarten wrote in a 2013 Profile of Salter, “as a writer’s writer, or, as John Ashbery once said of Elizabeth Bishop, a writer’s writer’s writer.”

James Salter dies at 90

James Salter

James Salter, author of A Sport and a Pastime, dies at 90

BIOGRAPHY

BY JENNIFER MAAS Posted June 19 2015 — 8:10 PM EDT

James Salter, the prize-winning author of Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime and All That Is, has died. He was 90.

His death was confirmed on Friday to The Associated Press by Alfred A. Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards.

Salter, never a big commercial success but admired by critics, wrote often on the topics of impermanence and mortality. He won the PEN/Faulkner prize for his 1988 collection Dusk and Other Stories and received both the Rea Award and the PEN/Malamud prize for lifetime achievement in short story writing.

Lena Heady as Cersei Lannister
The Walk of Shame
Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones: Lena Headey's nude Walk of Shame body double speaks out

How The Walk of Shame was made: Actress breaks silence on their brave 3-day performance

BIOGRAPHY OF REBECCA VAN CLEAVE

BY JAMES HIBBERD 

The body double who performed Game of Thrones’ Walk of Shame nude for three days is breaking her silence on enacting the stunning sequence. 

Actress Rebecca Van Cleave (photo below) worked closely with star Lena Headey on the gripping penance walk in Sunday’s season 5 finale. While filming the Walk in Dubrovnik last October, Van Cleave performed nude while Headey wore a simple beige shift. The show’s visual effects team then merged the performances together—combining Headey’s progression of facial emotions during Cersei’s punishing hike to the Red Keep and Van Cleave’s physical movement echoing Headey’s body language in order to create the seamless illusion that Headey was completely bare for the sequence.

'Game of Thrones' nude body double Rebecca Van Cleave defends Lena Headey

BIOGRAPHY OF REBECCA VAN CLEAVE

By Terri Schwartz
Jun 18th, 2015

When "Game of Thrones" viewers watched Cersei Lannister's Walk of Shame, they were actually seeing Rebecca Van Cleave's naked body. But she argues that doesn't take away from Lena Headey's performance.

"I personally don't agree with anybody who says having a body double detracts from the scene," the 27-year-old tells Entertainment Weekly. "Lena put her heart and soul into that scene. It should all be about the finished product, not about whose body was where and and whose head was where."

The 100 best novels / No 92 / Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)

The 100 best novels

written in English 

No 92

Housekeeping 

by Marilynne Robinson 

(1981)

Marilynne Robinson’s tale of orphaned sisters and their oddball aunt in a remote Idaho town is admired by everyone from Barack Obama to Bret Easton Ellis

Robert McCrum
Monday 22 June 2015 09.00 BST

E

ver since President Obama identified Gilead as one of his favourite contemporary books, Marilynne Robinson’s reputation has been dominated by her trilogy (including Home and Lila) about the Ames family of Iowa. Yet, almost 25 years before, Robinson completed and published a first novel which prefigures the mood and preoccupations of almost all her later work.

For me, Housekeeping remains her masterpiece, an unforgettable declaration of imaginative and narrative intent. It is also, as many critics have pointed out, the work of an American writer, and Calvinist, intimately at home with the Bible and the great transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville (No 17 in this series).

In the simple spirit of these masters, Robinson’s prose, replete with metaphor and simile, is achingly quotable: “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savours of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing – the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.” There’s no one else in America today writing with such natural inner music.

Housekeeping is the story of two orphans, Ruth and her sister Lucille Stone, living in remote Idaho by the lakeside town of Fingerbone. These abandoned girls are raised by a succession of relatives, and finally their aunt Sylvie, a strange drifter who becomes the novel’s compelling central character. Sylvie commits to staying in Fingerbone to “keep house” for her nieces, though neither believes she will stay with them for long. Ruth says: “I was reassured by her sleeping on the lawn, and now and then in the car. It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave.” Sylvie, who is like a “mermaid in a ship’s cabin”, wanders by the lake while the family house goes to pieces. Ruth, our narrator, is at home with her aunt’s transient spirit, and comfortable with solitude: “Once alone,” she says, “it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”

By contrast, Lucille wants to escape Sylvie’s spell. In an echo of Robinson’s own divided nature, the Stone sisters, inseparable in childhood, begin to grow apart. Ruth, a natural rebel, goes deeper into her family’s dark past; the more conventional Lucille moves away. Then the Fingerbone community steps in. Sylvie’s guardianship is challenged with the threat that she and Ruth should be separated. Robinson believes in family. She writes: “Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.”

So, rather than submit to yet another assault on their strange and transient association, Ruth and Sylvie burn down their house and escape together across the lake. The townspeople, who cannot understand the idea of self-sufficient “homeless” women, decide Ruth and Sylvie are insane and that they must have drowned in the lake.

In the words of an early New York Timesreview, this novel is “about people who have not managed to connect with a place, a purpose, a routine or another person. It’s about the immensely resourceful sadness of a certain kind of American, someone who has fallen out of history and is trying to invent a life without assistance of any kind, without even recognising that there are precedents. It is about a woman who is so far from everyone else that it would be presumptuous to put a name to her frame of mind”.

As a modern classic, Housekeeping can bear any weight of interpretation. Like Fingerbone’s lake water, it has become a mirror in which generations of new readers can find themselves, as if for the first time.

A note on the text

When I interviewed Marilynne Robinson at the Cambridge literary festival in November 2014, and asked her about the genesis of Housekeeping, her account was typically low-key and matter-of-fact, without any of the ostentation you might expect from the author of such an immense literary achievement. She had written the novel, in longhand, for her own pleasure, she said, without much thought about its afterlife, found it taken up by friends, then represented by the New York literary agent Ellen Levine, who sold it without delay to the famous American literary publishing house Farrar Straus and Giroux (which published it in the States in 1980), and in the UK to Faber.

In her Paris Review interview of 2008, she supplied a bit more detail, but not much: “When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to 19th-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson. When I entered the PhD programme, I started writing these metaphors down, just to get the feeling of writing in that voice. After I finished my dissertation, I read through the stack of metaphors and they cohered in a way that I hadn’t expected. I could see that I had created something that implied much more. So I started writing Housekeeping, and the characters became important for me. I told a friend of mine, a writer named John Clayton, that I had been working on this thing, and he asked to see it. The next thing I knew, I got a letter from his agent saying that she would be happy to represent it.”

What she, modestly, did not say to me was that, unknown as she was, an early rave review in the New York Times ensured that the book would be noticed. “Here’s a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life, waiting for it to form itself,” began the critic, Anatole Broyard. “It’s as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration. You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt.” Broyard’s awed enthusiasm was soon echoed by many critics and readers.

From the first, the reviews of Housekeeping were united in their admiration for the luminous subtlety of her work, and her powerfully simple, almost Biblical, way with language. This passage, typical of Robinson’s prose, introduces a new, timeless, and utterly distinctive voice into the magical polyphony of the American novel: “Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground – a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realised the ramifications of certain of his laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his creator.”

Marilynne Robinson

It’s well known, possibly notorious, that Robinson’s next work of fiction,Gilead, did not appear for almost 25 years. Again, when I interviewed her about Gilead for the Observer at her home in Iowa in 2005, her literary voice was undimmed, its concerns as deep-rooted, and the simple magic of her prose as potent as ever. Once again, she displayed an impressive detachment from the process of writing. It hadn’t, after all, been a 25-year struggle; she could write quite quickly; her favourite writing clothes were loose trousers (“pants”) and a sweatshirt – she “dressed like a bum”; the new book had come to her more or less fully formed, the fruit of an accidental vacation, and so on. Who knows how much of this is true? Robinson does not like to give much away. She mainly shuns the literary circuit. Perhaps this is why some American writers, especially, have fallen over themselves to pay tribute to her work.

Barbara Kingsolver writes: “I honestly believe reading [Robinson’s] prose slows down my respiration and heart rate, bringing me to a state of keen meditative attention. This novel is a marvel of carefully measured revelation.” More remarkable, perhaps, it Bret Easton Ellis’s acknowledgement that “it’s so beautifully written, the prose gives me the chills when I read it… it’s very meditative and very – a very different experience from most contemporary novels.”

In 2008, Barack Obama let slip that Robinson’s fiction, especially Gilead, was among his favourite reading. She, in amused confirmation, has joked about getting Christmas cards from the White House.

At the moment, she is planning another volume in her Ames/Gilead sequence.

Three more from Marilynne Robinson

Gilead (2004); Home (2008); Lila (2014).

THE GUARDIAN

000 The 100 best novels: an introduction by Robert McCrum

001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)

003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson  (1748)

005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding  (1749)

006 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)

010 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli  (1845)

012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  

015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

018 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)

020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

022 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome  (1889)

026  The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

027  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

028  New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) 

039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

055 As I Lay Dying  by William Faulkner  (1930)

056 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

057 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

058 Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)

059 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
065 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
066 Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
067 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
068 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
069 The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)

070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell  (1949)

071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene  (1951) 

072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)

078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

079 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) 

082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) 

084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966) 

086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

087 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)

088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979) 

091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

092 Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)

093  Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis (1984)

094 An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)

095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
096 Breathing Lesson by Anne Tyler (1988)
097 Amongst Women by John McGahem (1990)
098 Underwold by Don DeLillo (1997)
099 Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)

100 True Story of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)

How to write like Joan Didion

HOW TO WRITE LIKE JOAN DIDION 

MAY 22, 2015 

The Key to writing like Joan Didion is to combine detailed, thorough description with a hint of biting irony. This primer is for both fiction writers and journalists who are struggling to make their work more interesting. Luckily, Didion can elevate the mundane and deflate illusions of grandeur, all in one essay. For this article, I will be using examples from her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California in 1934, and has written many works of fiction and nonfiction the chronicle life in the state. She looked at the insanity of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, the rise of militant subcultures like the Black Panther Party and the Manson “family, as well as the intersection of bureaucracy, rebellion and politics. In her later years, her work has become far more personal, with books like The Year of Magical Thinking detailing the sudden death of her daughter and her husband. Didion was also associated with the “New Journalism” movement popularized by Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, but her style differs significantly from their work.

Joan Didion / The Art of Fiction

Joan Didion

The Art of Fiction 

No. 71

Interviewed by Linda Kuehl

The Paris Review No. 74

Fall-Winter 1978

It is usual for the interviewer to write this paragraph about the circumstances in which the interview was conducted, but the interviewer in this case, Linda Kuehl, died not long after the tapes were transcribed. Linda and I talked on August 18 and August 24, 1977, from about ten in the morning until early afternoon. Both interviews took place in the living room of my husband's and my house on the ocean north of Los Angeles, a house we no longer own. The walls in that room were white. The floors were of terracotta tile, very highly polished. The glare off the sea was so pronounced in that room that corners of it seemed, by contrast, extremely dark, and everyone who sat in the room tended to gravitate toward these dark corners. Over the years the room had in fact evolved to the point where the only comfortable chairs were in the dark, away from the windows. I mention this because I remember my fears about being interviewed, one of which was that I would be construed as the kind of loon who had maybe 300 degrees of sea view and kept all the chairs in a kind of sooty nook behind the fireplace. Linda's intelligence dispelled these fears immediately. Her interest in and acuity about the technical act of writing made me relaxed and even enthusiastic about talking, which I rarely am. As a matter of fact, this enthusiasm for talking technically makes me seem to myself, as I read over the transcript, a kind of apprentice plumber of fiction, a Cluny Brown at the writer's trade, but there we were.

My hero / Jim Crace by Daniel Hahn

 

Mystifying control … Jim Crace. Photograph: Matt Writtle

My hero: 

Jim Crace

 by Daniel Hahn

Jim Crace is a genius. I have read Harvest, which has just won the Impac prize, three times – and I still don’t know how he does it

Saturday 20 June 2015

I

’m currently on a translators’ residency, where one of our recurring dinnertime arguments is about whether genius exists, and if so, what it is. To some, it describes an ability, a gift, that is not merely above average but is somehow beyond comprehension; not just considerable skill, but inexplicable skill. If that definition holds, then Jim Crace, I think, is a genius. His 10th novel, Harvest – a small story about great change – has just won the 2015 Impac Dublin award; as one of the judges I’ve now read it three times, and I still don’t know how he does it. (Yes, I know “genius” sounds silly, but “magic” sounds even sillier.)