Joel Lovell profiles George Saunders for The New York Times, and he gives a killer endorsement for Saunders’s latest book, Tenth of December. The author’s collection from thirteen years ago, Pastoralia, was picked on our site as being among the “Best of the Millennium.”
“It is true that if there exists a ‘writer’s writer,’ [George] Saunders is the guy”
The Rooster Crows!
A winner has been named in The Morning News Tournament of Books. Was it John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars or Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son? Go find out!
Winesburg, Ohio Online
The University of Virginia Library (last mentioned for its William Faulkner recordings) has made the text of Sherwood Anderson‘s Winesburg, Ohio available online in its entirety.
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No Lie
“One lie I tell is that we care, generally—human beings—about each other. We could not, I tell myself in the moments just before the night’s dark hour, create The Odyssey or King Lear or Thomas and Beulah without a profound sense of The Other. Surely, were it true this thing’s a joke, nothing more, and a cruel one at that, we’d have no Dickinson, no Yeats, no freakin’ Rumi, read by Bly, loud on an old tape deck while I shower.” Pablo Tanguay on the art of lying.
Tuesday New Release Day: Toynton, Morrison
New this week is Evelyn Toynton’s The Oriental Wife, a novel of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, landed in New York. Also out is Grant Morrison’s Supergods, a scholarly exploration of comic book superheroes.
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Biography and Reputation
Penelope Fitzgerald has been getting a lot of attention lately, largely due to Hermione Lee‘s newest biography. In an article for the Paris Review, Bridget Read considers the impact a better understanding of Fitzgerald’s life could have on her modern reputation, and argues that “it is not extraordinary that she became a prize-winning novelist, though you may have heard otherwise. … It is vital to emphasize that Fitzgerald’s novels were not achieved in spite of her domestic life; they were borne directly out of it. Her work is radical in that it suggests that, in fact, a feminine experience, a liminal experience, might be better equipped than a male one to address the contradictions of human existence taken up by the greatest literature.”
Interview With Charles McNair
Over at Bloom today, a lively Q&A with Charles McNair, whose Pickett’s Charge was the subject of Kevin Hartnett’s recent review here. In particular, McNair takes us through the harrowing blow by blow of his road to publication, the “sophomore jinx story” from a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author.
When James met Wilde
Oscar Wilde: a “fatuous fool,” a “tenth-rate cad,” and an “unclean beast?” According to Henry James, all of the above.