On Friday, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin opened up its holdings of The Pale King, DFW’s last novel (which our own Garth Risk Hallberg reviewed for New York Magazine). At Page-Turner, D.T. Max picks through the new papers.
DFW, ctd.
Girl Prodigies
Millions contributor Michelle Dean wrote for The New Yorker‘s Page Turner about Opal Whiteley, whose childhood diary–written when she was six on scraps of paper–was published over 100 years ago to meet with acclaim, then controversy, and then obscurity. If girl prodigies interest you as much as they do me, you’ll also love this 2010 piece from Lapham’s Quarterly, on Barbara Newhall Follett.
Literary Louisiana
In a piece for The New York Times Jennifer Moses takes a tour of south Louisiana, “a place that produces writers the way France produces cheese — prodigiously, and with world-class excellence — a place that calls on its writers’ talent and inspiration and, in turn, is reflected back into the world through their words,” and of the past haunts of Tennessee Williams, Anne Rice and Kate Chopin.
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“Swamp Fuschia”
Scandal at the Oxford English Dictionary! Robert Burchfield’s efforts in the 70s and 80s to delete words from the dictionary based on their foreign origins have been uncovered.
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