Author Sighting

J.K. Rowling’s slow, inexorable slide out of retirement continues. As we noted a couple of months ago, “For someone who’s not writing any more books about Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling sure is doing a lot of dabbling.”Earlier this year, we wrote about one of Rowling’s post-retirement dabblings, the production of seven handmade copies of Beedle the Bard, a book of “wizarding fairy tales” referred to in the Harry Potter series. Amazon spent $4 million on a copy, and then used it to market a writing contest. Part of the prize, incidentally, was the opportunity “to spend a weekend with the rare and delightful book of fairy tales (security guards included, of course).”Now that prize doesn’t look quite so exclusive, as Bloomsbury and Scholastic have made an edition the book available for the masses for just $7.59 and arriving in early December, just in time for the holidays. Amazon is going one further, offering up to 100,000 pricier facsimile “collector’s editions,” with “a reproduction of J.K. Rowling’s handwritten introduction, metalwork and clasp, and replica gemstones,” as well as various other accouterments.All net proceeds go to a charity co-founded by Rowling.

This morning I read this bittersweet story in the New York Times about the auctioning of Vladimir Nabokov’s personal effects by his son Dmitri. As Dmitri has no heirs, it was agreed before the elder Nabokov’s death that it would be best to sell the collection before the death of the younger Nabokov. Reading the story, with its descriptions of invented butterfly drawings for Nabokov’s wife Vera — “They have variegated colors, delicate artistry and fanciful names. Only on these pages appear the blue ‘Colias verae’ or the dark ‘Maculinea aurora Nab.'” — reminded me of how much I enjoyed reading Nabokov’s lyrical memoir, Speak, Memory, when I was in college. I read it for a class called Transatlantic Identities, taught by the dandyish Professor Tucker (who was most of all devoted to John Ruskin). We read a dozen or so memoirs penned over the last 150 years on either side of the Atlantic. Among these, Speak, Memory, was transcendent, inspiring an interest both in lepidoptery and Nabokov’s expressive prose. As I read the book, Nabokov, in my mind, was transformed from the scurrilous author of the scandalous Lolita to the quiet emigre with a fascination for butterflies, and whose expertise with these brightly- winged insects landed him the curatorship of the butterfly collection at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Now that these butterflies have been scattered throughout the world, one can only hope that the hands that now hold them will cherish the butterflies as much as the hands that created them.

The majestic tawdriness of L’Affaire Edwards had us scrambling for literary precedents – The Scarlet Letter?, Silas Marner? – but, amid the swirl of rumors, we almost overlooked The McInerney Connection. Luckily, our trusted fellow readers at The New York Times were there with the scoop: In the mid-1980s, John Edwards’ apparent paramour, Rielle Hunter – then known (somewhat less mellifluously) as Lisa Druck – ran with New York’s literary Brat Pack. Indeed, Jay McInerney based a book on her. Mr. McInerney told the Times that his 1988 novel, Story of My Life, was narrated in the first person from the point of view of an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled sexually voracious 20-year-old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa…This revelation was apparently enough to vault Story of My Life into Amazon’s Top 500 books.In an impressive feat of commitment and/or masochism, Peter Miller of the Freebird Books and Goods blog actually sat down this weekend and read Story of My Life in its entirety. His findings are fascinating and suggestive. Of an older conquest, for example, Lisa/Rielle/”Allison” tells us, “I never thought he was very good-looking, but you could tell he thought he was. He believed it so much he could actually sell other people on the idea.” And: “He seemed older and sophisticated and we had great sex, so why not?”