A charming doodle of the beautiful connecting covers for mid Clarice Lispector’s four soon-to-be-released novels. You can also buy a poster of the original from New Directions. And given how much Carolyn Kellogg enjoyed them, mentally shelving the Brazilian author beside Kafka and Joyce, and of course based on the near infinite readability of The Hour of the Star, I’m wondering if this will be the year of Lispector.
Near to the wild heart
The Return of the (Poet) King
“Grim was the world and grey last night / The moon and stars were fled.” It looks like even J.R.R. Tolkien might have been a an angsty teen. Two previously unseen poems by the legendary author have been found in a forgotten annual printed by a small primary school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1936. For another Tolkien-related blast from the past, here is W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King, book three of the Lord of the Rings series.
“A history of fire flooding and water flooding”
Not every Craigslist ad is noteworthy, but this property listing, titled “Gorgeous Rural Mountain Acreage” and hailing from Kentucky, is a notable (and sobering) exception. Full-Stop republished the whole thing, which includes warnings that “bears are known to be about” and “beautiful water seeps.”
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Jonathan Dee’s Privileges
The Rumpus follows suit and interviews Jonathan Dee, the author of a novel, The Privileges, for which he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
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Remembering Sue Grafton
Crime novelist Sue Grafton passed away earlier this week from cancer. Lit Hub and Vulture both have touching tributes to her and her detective series starring Kinsey Millhone. “Grafton belonged to a cluster of female authors who viewed the private-detective subgenre, previously dominated by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Grafton’s own hero, Ross Macdonald, in desperate need of subverting” and “The annual release of her latest Kinsey Millhone novel was, for generations of devotees, one of the year’s premier literary events. ” Rest in peace Ms. Grafton.
Messes of Contradiction
Clare Beams reflects on her impressions of Little Women as a child and an adult at Ploughshares. A piece of her essay: “Of course, none of the real Alcott sisters could have fit into the spaces Little Women carved out for them. No real person could…. Real-life girls are messes of contradiction.” You could also read Deena Drewis’s essay on the perception of women’s writing and gender bias in publishing.
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It Doesn’t End on Tuesday, Either
Yesterday was Fat Tuesday down in New Orleans, and if you missed the action down there, you can certainly get a taste of the local flavor by reading Rick Bragg’s 1997 piece in The New York Times, “New Orleans Doesn’t Wait for Friday.” (via)