Yesterday it was learned that Pulitzer Prize winning author Carol Shields passed away. She was best known for the book that won her the prize, The Stone Diaries. They broadcast an old interview with her on NPR yesterday, and Shields talked about how she squeezed in an hour of writing each day between teaching and taking care of her young children and after nine months she had written The Stone Diaries. Her last book, Unless, didn’t recieve a huge amount of press, but it sold tremendously well at my bookstore and was much loved by the readers I spoke to about it. If you want to learn more about her, here is her obit in the New York Times.
RIP Carol Shields
Conversations with Harvey Pekar
I started reading Harvey Pekar’s comic book series American Splendor in high school, when I was anxious about my future and frustrated by my present. Little did I know then, Pekar would soon become a friend and a confidant of sorts.
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Carla Cohen, You Will Be Missed
The secret of the store's success has been that the owners loved books and weren't afraid to have opinions or share them with their customers. And the customers responded to that passion.
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Will Eisner RIP
Over at Beatrice, I saw the posting that Will Eisner has died. Eisner is credited by many with inventing the graphic novel -- or at least turning it into the form we recognize today (A Contract with God is his landmark work). Many of today's most prominent graphic novelists cite Eisner as a major influence. At the moment, none of the major news sites have posted an obit (aside from this brief piece at E&P), but you can expect to see some soon.UPDATE: Here come the obits: DenisKitchen.com, WaPo, NYT
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Those Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries of 2017
Poets, editors, songwriters, teachers, journalists, novelists—some great writers and some under-sung ones left us this year. Here is a selective compendium of literary obituaries from 2017.
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A Champion of Literary Translation: On the Loss of Michael Henry Heim
Heim was a man who literally seemed to have more hours in the day than the rest of us. He was someone who pushed for greater visibility of translation in the larger world of American letters, who supported and nurtured would-be translators with every free minute.
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Hunter S. Thompson
Just found out that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself. It's unbelievable. I suppose he's one of those guys who didn't want to die of old age. Maybe we'll find out more...HST has been appropriated by many. He came to represent a lot of things, especially an over-the-top counter-cultural wackiness, that he may or may not have signed up for. It also seems like his work is dismissed by as many as those who embrace it. To my mind, his books, especially those penned from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, included long stretches of blinding brilliance. Unfortunately, there is a lot of bad HST writing on bookshelves too, but his public demanded it, I suppose. My favorite HST book is Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail '72 which is about the race that led up to Nixon's reelection. If you have even the slightest interest in politics, this is an essential book. In it the ever-distractable HST follows the many tangents that encompass the insanity of the American political process. In one particularly surreal scene, Thompson shares a long limo ride with Nixon. The election is not the only - nor even the central - drama of the book, which originally appeared almost in its entirety in Rolling Stone. The subplot that occasionally becomes the plot of the book, is whether or not HST will be able to finish the book and to face the inevitability of Nixon's reelection. In the end he does not, and the reader is left frustrated, wanting this man - who seems to have an answer for everything - to stick it out until election day, but he can't. I think, though, that that was Thompson's way. It's infuriating in that instance, as well as in today's, but in exchange we got brilliance from a man who wrote with such fury that he burnt himself right out.See also: the AP obit. The first of many to come.