The newest issue of The Quarterly Conversation is up. Eclectic as ever, it features pieces on Yasushi Inoue, Jose Saramago, Stephen Dixon, Thomas Bernhard, and more.
New TQC
Norris Church Mailer dead at 61
Norris Church Mailer, widow of Norman Mailer, died yesterday at 61 following a long battle with cancer. Mark Olshaker, president of the Norman Mailer Society, wrote: “She was the pilgrim soul who captured and won Norman’s heart and mind and who shared with him the last three decades of his life.”
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Literary One-Hit Wonders
Second Act lists the renowned literary one-hit wonders, including John Kennedy Toole, Sylvia Plath and Ralph Ellison. (via AuthorScoop)
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How to Backfire
Turns out the Streisand effect applies to book sales. The Wall Street Journal reports that banning a book in China causes sales to increase both at home and abroad. “These days, smothering someone is as good as crowning that person,” the article quotes a Chinese reader as saying. You could also read Deanna Fei on being a Chinese-American writer in China.
True Coffeeshop Story
“Literary interviews became popular in the eighteen-eighties, but Richard Altick, the late professor of Victorian literature at Ohio State University, traces the public fascination with writers’ homes at least as far back as the eighteen-forties, when there was a vogue for books describing the houses and landscapes of famous authors, complete with engravings and, later, photographs.” On the strangeness of literary celebrity.
Reflected Identities in Fiction
For Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, Anita Felicelli asked 13 authors to recount the first time they saw themselves reflected in a work of fiction.
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Nabokov Pitches Hitchcock
Remember that time Vladimir Nabokov pitched Alfred Hitchcock a melodramatic love story about a girl and an astronaut? No? Read all about it.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Tosches, Saramago, Maurois, Buarque, Light
Out today are Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches; Raised from the Ground by Jose Saramago; Climates, a newly translated novel from 1928 by French writer Andre Maurois; Spilt Milk by Brazilian writer Chico Buarque; and Alan Light’s The Holy or the Broken about a Leonard Cohen song that Jeff Buckley made famous.