Great Stories, People, Books & Events in Literary History

On this day in 1948, J. D. Salinger's 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' was published in the New Yorker; in the same magazine, on the same day in 1953, Salinger's 'Teddy' also appeared. These are the first and last selections in Nine Stories (1953), Salinger's only collection. 'Bananafish' introduces Seymour Glass, one of the many that Salinger would cast in the Holden mold and predicament.

How to know if you’re reading a bad book

1. Are the characters’ names impossible to pronounce? Alternatively, when you pronounce them, do you realize that they are actually homonyms for scary-sounding English words? If the book is not written by Tolkien and is not a parody, it might be a Bad Book.
2. Do your villains have implicit/explicit homosexual tendencies that reflect the unthinking homophobia and unimaginative laziness of the author? If so, you might be reading a Bad Book.
3. Do your characters experience instantaneous mind-blowing attraction that causes them to act in increasingly stupid ways so that the plot moves forward because only mind-numbing lust could possibly justify how ridiculously moronic the otherwise lethal/professional/intelligent characters are suddenly acting? If so, you might be reading a Bad Book.
4. Does anyone lurk? If someone’s lurking, you might be reading a Bad Book

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Requiem

Requiem
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE

The Memory Artists

I once had a mother in law who expressed disdain or dislike of something by saying, "Well that's different." Sometimes that comment was aimed at me. This novel by Jeffrey Moore is different but in a good way. It is refreshing, intriguing and postmodernist.
Noel Burun's beloved mother, Stella, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He is challenged by having to provide care for her and by feeling the pressure of discovering a cure for the disease. Did I mention that he's a synaesthete? He engages the help of a motley crew consisting of a sex/drug addict, a beautiful woman who is trying to escape her past and a goofy and excitable sort of guy who is trapped in nostalgia for a childhood that may or may not have existed. This gang helps care for Stella while Noel works in his basement lab to develop a magic pill aided by the notes of his father, a depressive who killed himself years ago. Hovering over the story like a storm cloud and/or puppet master is Dr. Vorta who has treated all the characters in his clinic and had an affair with Stella years before.
Against all odds the novel is entertaining and humourous. It held my interest and made me laugh. I'd recommend it to those who like something a little offbeat and very clever.

RIP John Updike

John Updike Is Dead at 76
Updike's death means something to me. When I was a very young girl, perhaps 14, I discovered Rabbit Angstrom in Rabbit Run. I read in quick succession all of the books he had written subsequent to that one. I lacked the emotional maturity and life experience to understand the dynamics that he explored but I loved the language. He made me want to write like him. Alas...

Goose Girl

Goose Girl

Snapped him wide open,
spine in her teeth,
three drops of blood, flutter,
a series of shocks.

She was late, too late for him,
an enchantment, his secret.

He forgot what it was like to stand
in the forest and bleed, pressed,
tied, silenced but for the false
dark with mink eyelashes.

There was the lesson of compliance.
There was the animal’s head encased in plastic—
sooner or later the gas had to find a way.

There was no letting up once she started peeling
the skin off her heel, shed her entire, a little hissing
fit, don’t call it, don’t call it fit.

A criminologist discovered the truth
by the stains on her dress, pink skin
underneath and the bees
gathered on her toes.

My affair with Kurt Vonnegut

Loree Rackstraw has given the first details of the 40-year relationship for the first time since the American writer's death in 2007.

In a forthcoming 'intimate biography', the English professor recalls the 'great bear of a man' that wrote her letters and took her on romantic holidays.

Famous Writers with Bipolar Disorders

Pendulum Resources: Famous Writers with Bipolar Disorders:
# Hans Christian Andersen
# Honore de Balzac
# James Barrie
# Arthur Benson (H)
# E.F. Benson
# James Boswell
# William Faulkner (H)
# F. Scott Fitzgerald (H)
# Lewis Grassic Gibbon (SA)
# Nikolai Gogl
# Maxim Gorky (SA)
# Kenneth Graham
# Graham Greene
# Ernest Hemingway (H, S)
# Hermann Hesse (H, SA)
# Henrik Ibsen
# William Inge (H, S)
# Henry James
# William James
# Charles Lamb (H)
# Malcolm Lowry (H, S)
# John Bunyan
# Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
# Joseph Conrad (SA)
# Charles Dickens
# Isak Dinesen (SA)
# Ralph Waldo Emerson
# Herman Melville
# Eugene O'Neill (H, SA)
# Francis Parkman
# John Ruskin (H)
# Mary Shelley
# Jean Stafford (H)
# Robert Louis Stevenson
# August Strindberg
# Leo Tolstoy
# Ivan Turgenev
# Tennessee Williams (H)
# Mary Wollstonecraft (SA)
# Virginia Woolf (H, S)
# Emile Zola

The Top 10 'other' Scottish Poems

Iain Crichton Smith, A Young Highland Girl Studying Poetry

Non-one does clash of cultures better than Smith, as a Gaelic girl gets to grips with English literature.

Poetry drives its lines into her forehead

like an angled plough across a bare field.

I’ve seen her kind before…

And she - like them – should grow along these valleys

Bearing bright children, being kind to love.

Simple affection needs no complex solace

nor quieter minds abstractions of the grave…

Thomas Pynchon’s National Book Award acceptance speech by Professor Irwin Corey

Via Uncertain Times

How well do you know Edgar Allan Poe?

"Two hundred years after the birth of a writer who blazed a trail for American letters, it's time to challenge your knowledge of the macabre genius"Quiz

Edgar Allan Poe at 200

Slide Show

Jan. 19, 2009, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe died at 40, on Oct. 7, 1849, but his poetic and storytelling genius changed literature forever.

When Shakespeare met Seuss

Being a bookish-type, undoubtedly of frail disposition and chary of crowds and vulgarity, you might not be aware of the concept of mash-ups.Generally, in the strange and frightening world of young people, this involves some enterprising soul taking two popular music records and taking bits from one - normally the vocals - and playing them over bits from another, usually the music.At a loose end, I started trying the same trick with literature. More

Why Tintin fans had to leap straight to his defence

"Tintin, the eternal boy reporter, marks his 80th birthday today but, for France, the celebrations have been soured by a perfidious claim from across the Channel that the comic strip hero is gay."

Penguin Book Cover Deckchairs

Penguin Deckchairs
Via

Daily Routines

"How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days."
Via

Book-Cut Sculpture

Via Nag on the Lake

The Book Cover Archive

The Age of Longing

I bought this book thinking it was a newer Richard Wright novel. It was actually written in 1995, pre Clara Callan, his Giller and GG award winning novel. Wright is a local author who lives just down the road in St. Catharines and did the bookclub to which I belonged the honour of attending one of our meetings. Wright talked about his craft in a very informal setting and I was charmed by his sweet manner. The Age of Longing like Clara Callan captures old-time, small town Ontario like an insect trapped in amber. It is a sad novel, spanning three generations. Howard Wheeler, a book editor, suffers a heart attack just as his mother dies at the family home in Huron Falls, Ontario. He misses the funeral but returns to settle her estate. The novel flips from past to present and back again. Howard's parents' marriage is the focus of the novel, a mismatch if ever there was one. His dad, Buddy Wheeler, was a hard drinking, small town hockey player who almost makes it to the big leagues. His mother, Grace, is an independent thinking school teacher who holds a strong disdain for games and the men who play them. She is prim to the extreme. Buddy is irresponsible and fun loving. Wright somehow makes us believe that these two polar opposites could have wed and mated. Howard, the product of that unlikely union, spends the novel searching for meaning in that history. It's an elegant, old fashioned book and I loved it.
I find it curious that I have chosen to read three books in a row that address the search for emotional inheritance in small town family history. Must be a stage I'm going through.