“Authors – especially those who wrote with pens instead of those soulless computer things – are prime doodlers.” Check out this gallery of doodles by famous authors, from Sylvia Plath to Franz Kafka to Henry Miller.
Doodles by Famous Authors
I want to feel what I feel. Even if it’s not happiness
Toni Morrison gives a devastating interview in The Guardian.
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The First American Novel
“He is now even upon the point of marrying—shall I proceed!—of marrying his Sister! I fly to prevent incest!” Dan Piepenbring writes about reading The Power of Sympathy, America's first novel, for The Paris Review.
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A Most Terrible State
Yesterday I told you about a ridiculously rare signed copy of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a poem famously loaded with coldness and sterility and failed human intimacy. Later this month, some new letters will be published that reveal the depth of Eliot's mental anguish over the breakdown of his first marriage with his wife, Vivien. Eliot has long been accused (maybe fairly) of treating Vivien with intolerable cruelty and attributing to her mental state, and these letters aim to complicate that narrative.
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Books for Problematic Times
Read and submit a "book for problematic times," a blogger's response to Newsweek's uninspired 50 Books for Our Times.
Profile of Rick Moody
At the Hartford Advocate, Craig Fehrman talks to Rick Moody about his “perplexing” career and latest novel, The Four Fingers of Death: “Moody isn’t the worst writer of his generation, but he is one of the most successful ...”
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Public Solitude
“You can’t be worrying how you sound. You can’t wonder whether you or your characters are likable or smart or interesting. You have to be inside the scene—the tactile world of tables and chairs and sunlight—attending to your characters, people who exist for you in nonvirtual reality.” Paris Review editor Lorin Stein writes for The New York Times about solitude in the age of the Internet and the future of the book.
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