Our own Bill Morris has long worn his writer’s hat, but he recently revealed to us his artistic side. Now his Flannery O’Connor portrait has fetched an impressive price in the recent One Story magazine charity auction. Is art world stardom next?
Bill Morris, Artist
“Norman was the very antithesis of minimalism”
Apart from calling up visions of a Carver-Mailer axis of literary minimalism, these remarks by Joyce Carol Oates upon winning the Mailer Prize convince us that Mailer had quite the unflappable ego.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sacks; Hitchens; Li; Whitman
Out this week: Gratitude by Oliver Sacks; And Yet by Christopher Hitchens; The Lost Garden by Ang Li; and a new edition of Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems by Walt Whitman. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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The French Word for “Triangle” is “Triangle.”
Once upon a time, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were buds. Then their friendship soured beyond repair. What happened? Ask Wanda.
It Keeps Giving
“Still, it’s difficult to know whether [Shel] Silverstein, who died of a heart attack in 1999, after keeping out of the public eye for more than two decades, meant for us to read the book so conclusively. His biography and body of work suggest a subtler, and, in the end, perhaps an even more troubling, way of looking at it.” Ruth Margalit on The Giving Tree.
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Performing the Trick
Chloe N. Clark writes about magical reveals in fiction. As she explains it, “authors, like magicians, need to know when the best moment to pull back the curtain is.” Pair with this Millions essay on using light and a full palette of color to paint fiction.
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Carrying on García Márquez’s Torch
After the passing of Gabriel García Márquez, the team of Reed Johnson, Juan Forero, and Sara Munoz had cause to opine within the pages of the Wall Street Journal, who are the other “post-boom Spanish-language fiction writers whose works continue to redraw the map of Latin literature?” They list six suggestions, but I think one of the names on that list would've disagreed with the comparison. (Bonus: An unpublished Márquez manuscript may be on the way as well.)
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Broken Embraces
Catch it while you can: Charlie Rose's hour-long interview with Pedro Almodóvar and his muse, Penélope Cruz, touches on character, confidence, and control, and is currently available online. Almodóvar's latest film, Broken Embraces, which I saw last summer in Madrid sans subtitles, was so visually stunning and well-acted that despite my meager translation the film enthralled. With a proper translation, it should be ravishing.
hey Bill, hope u and yours are well. surfing the net over a bottle ok maybe 2 bottles of white wine. should be filing my federal taxes but not. so there. damn this was difficult to type. backspace the most pecked of the keys. caps totally out of the question. here with my friend bummed cuz we still dont have burning man tickets for our 50th bday bash. gd im 50. peace, buttry [email protected]