“Yeats wrote frankly about his vocation as a magician in several memoirs.” On how the occult drew in W. B. Yeats because “it was so deeply connected with his poetic craft.”
W.B. Yeats: Poet, Playwright, Magician
“You’re allowed to laugh.”
A new installment of #LitBeat, in which Steve Almond gives a hilarious and exuberant reading in Moscow, Idaho.
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Postscript
Just before he died earlier this year, Nobel winner Günter Grass completed his last manuscript, Vonne Endlichkait, “a literary experiment” that combines prose, poetry, and illustration. The book has just been published in German and will be available in English next year.
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Elif Batuman on Reading the Russians
Essayist and Russian literature scholar Elif Batuman in an interview with the Boston Globe on how the Russians get the combination of "funny and sad" better than the Germans, the English, or the French.
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Jim Crace’s Last Novel
Author Jim Crace reflects on his final book in Abu Dhabi's The National: “The thing is, I’ve written an appalling amount of books. ... The writing life doesn’t last forever. I am fit and well, and there are plenty of other things to do that I’m excited about, which are incompatible with spending most of my life shut up in a room. So that’s what I’m going to do, write a final book, and that will be it.”
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“First Reads with James Wood”
The Faster Times recaps James Wood's recent lecture on David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
Looking forward to reading about this. Someone– think it is Brenda Maddox– has a bio of Yeats focused on his love of the supernatural. what really stuck with me from that book, however, was that Yeats struggled with learning to read. I believe he was 7 or 8 before he did. His father– the painter Jack B. Yeats–used to throw books at William Butler’s head, which just about broke my heart. And his mother was very remote, but took pleasure in telling them fairy tales of west of Ireland.
There is a new book that is available on Amazon called “W.B. Yeats and the Secret Masters of the world.” Its a fictional account of his involvement with the occult and the Golden Dawn. I thought it was a fantastic read and for anyone interested in Yeats or the Golden Dawn I highly recommend it. The author is Peter Jennings and it only came out recently as far as I know. Although it is fictional and fairly satirical it seems clear that the writer has done his research and his presentation of Yeats as a character has been accomplished in a thoughtful manner.
Link for anyone interested:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Yeats-Secret-Masters-World-ebook/dp/B00APLNSMG/ref=zg_bs_426323031_46