The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster is now on sale, and among other things, it reveals that its author, who appeared to feel queasy about sex in general, didn’t know exactly how “male and female joined” until he was thirty years old.
A Writer Who Needed “The Talk”
The Man Was Hard on Himself
Hot on the heels of The New Yorker, The Paris Review is excerpting Calvino’s letters. In Monday’s entry, POSTERITY IS STUPID, the author writes the following: “Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious and at the slightest flattery I immediately start to strut like a turkey.”
The S Monster
ICYMI, J.J. Abrams (of Lost and Star Trek fame) will release a novel -- conceived by Abrams and written by Doug Dorst -- in October with the enigmatic title of S. Last month, he released the first half of a teaser trailer; this week, he released the second half.
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Harry Potter V. Willy the Wizard
Lit crit becomes a legal matter: "The contrast between the total concept and feel of the works is so stark that any serious comparison of the two strains credulity," wrote the English judge who has dismissed the case against J.K. Rowling brought by the estate of Willy the Wizard author Adrian Jacobs. Jacobs' estate claimed that Rowling had plagiarized elements of Willy the Wizard's plot in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
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Steve Jobs Biography Gets Unexpected PR Boon
Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs is slated for a November 21st release. As the Apple CEO announced his resignation last night, the timing of the book Steve Jobs really could not be better.
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Love and Blue Globes
Recommended Reading: "Three Things I Have Never Told Anyone," an essay on love, blue globes and things unsaid by Ayşe Papatya Bucak.
Thunder Thighs
Recommended Reading: This important essay from Gayle Branedis at The Rumpus on our cultural obsession with women’s thighs.
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The Real-Life Inspiration behind Hugo’s Quasimodo
The Telegraph reports that a new discovery appears to reveal that Quasimodo, the seemingly mythical hero of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, may have been based on a real-life figure.
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Another Dossier
"Part of what I realize now I was doing in Proxies was to integrate the incongruous aspects of my self: the child of the truck driver and Primitive Baptist self, the queer intellectual poet self, the professor without an office self, the prizewinner who was 'midcareer' before he was 'emerging,' the middle-aged man at the entry-level rungs of the gig economy." Go check out this interview with Brian Blanchfield over at The Rumpus. This is the second Blanchfield interview we've told you about, both worth taking a look.
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I remember being told that by an English professor at Brooklyn College in the 1970s.