Her Own Society

In April of 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote to a stranger, initiating a fervent twenty-four-year correspondence, in the course of which they managed to meet only twice. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, thirty-eight, was a man of letters, a clergyman, a fitness enthusiast, a celebrated abolitionist, and a champion of women’s rights, whose essays on slavery and suffrage, but also on snow, flowers, and calisthenics, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. “Letter to a Young Contributor,” the article that inspired Dickinson to approach him, was a column addressed to literary débutantes and—despite his deep engagement with the Civil War—a paean to the bookish life: “There may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence,” he wrote, evoking Dickinson’s poetry without yet having seen it. “Mr. Higginson,” she began, with no endearment. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”Read more

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Julian Barnes remembers Penelope Fitzgerald

"She was an accident-prone grandmother, who fitted writing into the gaps in family life, and her first publisher dismissed her as 'an amateur writer'. But she became the best English novelist of her time. Julian Barnes pays tribute to Penelope Fitzgerald" More

I discovered her only recently and read Offshore and the much better The Blue Flower back to back. I have a copy of The Bookshop that I have yet to get around to. This article is nudging me toward the bookshelf.

The Romantics Have Spoken

"If you’ll recall: A little movie called “Sex and the City” featured a fictional book, “Love Letters of Great Men.” Well, fiction has become fact: Inspired by the movie, Pan Macmillan, the U.K. book publisher, is releasing “Love Letters of Great Men” next week. Darwin and Flaubert, Mozart and Twain, Browning and Wilde — “every shade of love is here,” the book site proclaims."

I'm conflicted. Love letters, yay! Anything remotely related to Sex and the City, yuck!
via Paper Cuts

On this day

On this day in 1869 Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad was published. Twain said he regarded the book as God regarded the world: 'The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both"

Four poems about string theory

Building Blocks, by Robert Borski

Morons are not elementary particles,
birds do not quark, and half-
dead cats fail to constitute roadkill.

On the other hand
silly string may underpin much
of the universe, and in
the toychest of infinities
both larger and smaller sets can be
found side by side.

God as a boy must have been
a strange child, if not actually gifted.

See more poems here
Via Nag on the Lake

The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats

“The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats,” is an exhibition with audiotapes, four short films and software that brings light and breath to aging manuscripts.

It amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride again along the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries.

See the videos Yeats, the Public Man and Sailing to Byzantium.

You can't tell a book by its title

Marginal Revolution: The best books with the worst titles

Going Down the Road - Places Captured in Time

An interesting article about government funded Depression era travel guides.

Writers, photographers and editors, some as famous as Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty and others long forgotten, earned as little as $20 a week to produce a series of travel guides about America.

The child in time

Ian McEwan on his family's astonishing story and the brother he never knew he had

Rick Moody reads his poetry

His black humourous novel, Purple America, is a favourite of mine. This is funny too.

The Master and Margarita as a graphic novel

The Master and Margarita slideshow

Rushdie wins the Best of the Booker - again

Midnight’s Children wins the Best of the Booker:

"27 years after its initial publication Midnight's Children is in the news again as it is today (10 July 2008) announced as the winner of the Best of the Booker.

The only time that a celebratory award has previously been created for ‘the Booker' was in 1993 - the 25th anniversary - when Salman Rushdie also won the Booker of Bookers with Midnight's Children."

The Dissident

First off let me say that I enjoyed reading this first novel by Nell Freudenberger. It's young and it's clever. It's the story of a dissident Chinese artist Yuan Zhou, a victim of political persecution, who arrives in California to teach at an exclusive girls' school and to present an exhibition of his art. It is also the story of the Travers family which hosts him. It's about a broken family and a broken culture. It's about people with problems and people with secrets. The well-heeled Travers family consists of a distant, boring psychoanalyst dad (Gordon), a do-gooder wife and mother (Cece), a dancer daughter (Olivia) and a seriously disturbed son (Max). Adding to the mix are Gordon's brother, Phil, who has had an affair with Cece and his sister, Joan, who is an emotionally isolated author. There is also a sexually precocious troublemaker, a talented Chinese adolescent artist, a colony of Beijing performance artists, various peripheral romantic interests and a menagerie of pets. A number of fundamental questions are raised. What is art? What is truth? There are a lot of characters and some of them lack depth but I appreciated Freudenberger's skilled,witty and compassionate descriptions of them. I found the ending to be a bit anti-climactic but I still recommend the novel.

On this day in literature

Eliot and the Woolfs:

"On this day in 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend that 'I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr. Eliots [sic] poem with my own hands -- you see how my hand trembles.' Though referring to the typesetting of the first English edition of The Waste Land, Woolf's trembling was due to exhaustion rather than any presage of the moment's importance."

How Hunter S. Thompson beat back his writer's block

Writers sometimes suffer bouts of major paralysis. They want to write, are desperate to get down something great, but it’s just not coming easily, in fact not at all.

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The MoJo Interview: David Sedaris

"Last March, The New Republic called bullshit on humorist David Sedaris, accusing him of exaggerating his autobiographical stories. Oh well. Sedaris' new book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, is as improbably hilarious as his others, and it doesn't look like he's about to apologize on Oprah anytime soon. Sedaris spoke with Mother Jones from his house in London."

Summer reading

How to pick the right book for any trip
"A Room With a View might be perfect for a Tuscan villa, but what should you read at the Burning Man festival or while cooped up with the kids in a West Country cottage? Six leading writers select the best books to take with you - whatever type of holiday you're going on"

Minor edit

"I just read your intro—great stuff, really. I just have a few minor changes/corrections. No big thing."
Via Coudal

Literary Tattoos

For People who Love Books:

"My desire to consume the works of others is an ever pressing need that never seems to fade, which is probably why 3/4 of my tattoos are words--an Elvish phrase from J.R.R. Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings', a Polish quote by a famous scholar and lastly, the only tattoo which is written in English, a paraphrase scrawled across the back of my neck that says wake your dreams."

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