Tom Stoppard, recently tasked with writing the screenplays for the new Anna Karenina (six minutes of which can be watched here) and Parade’s End film and television adaptations, speaks at length with Victoria Glendinning about his life and work. At 75 years old, the playwright is hardly slowing down.
Tom Stoppard on life, work, and fly-fishing
The life cycle of political poems
“Good political poems, outlive the events that shape them… they lead strange lives.” One such poem, written after a pogrom 100 years ago, has since been translated by Palestinian resistance leaders, and more recently claimed as “Israeli” by PM Netanyahu. Some of the most notable works of the genre have been collected by Poetry. New projects in political poetry I’m excited about: online journal Matter Monthly, and Rattle’s Sunday column for a political poem addressing events of that week.
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Literature from the Forever Wars
“All war literature, across the centuries, bears witness to certain eternal truths: the death and chaos encountered, minute by minute; the bonds of love and loyalty among soldiers; the bad dreams and worse anxieties that afflict many of those lucky enough to return home.” In an omnibus review for The New York Times Michiko Kakutani looks at the fiction and journalism being written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including recent Year in Reading alum and National Book Award winner Phil Klay‘s Redeployment and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, “the one book that most fluently and kaleidoscopically captures both the micro and the macro of Iraq.” She also wonders, and attempts to explain, “why has there been no big, symphonic Iraq or Afghanistan novel?”
Charles Ramsey Memoir in the Works
Charles Ramsey, who is best known for rescuing the three women held captive in Ariel Castro’s house last summer, has signed a book deal with Gray & Co.
Old World Values
Henry James wrote a number of odd things about Jewish and Italian immigrants, but is it fair to call him a racist? In The New Criterion, Stephen Miller argues that it isn’t, recalling the time James spent with immigrants on the Lower East Side.
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Similes Like Bombs
Senior New York Times book critic Dwight Garner talked with Prospect Magazine about his career and the literary landscape. Of the new online critical publications, which ones did the interviewer single out for compliments? Answer: the LARB and The Millions. (Aw.)
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Barely a mention of fly fishing