The story of how a publishing house began is the definition of literary inside baseball, but this piece by Jonathan Galassi — in which the FSG president responds to an upcoming book on the heyday of his company — does a pretty nice job of spurring a general reader’s interest. Among other things, it reveals that First Wife Dorothea Straus once called the company’s office “a sexual sewer.”
Early Days
Forgetting Poetry
We all probably had the humiliating experience of reciting a poem in high school. Yet at Salon, Nina Kang believes that memorizing poetry is a lost art. She blames the loss of the discipline on our tendency to skim and new poetry’s seeming aversion to memorization. “Writers actively fight against the appearance of artifice, and often instead strive for an informal, offhand tone, with that hint of clumsiness that lends a certain authenticity to the voice. It turns out this is a quality that makes the reciter’s job that much more difficulty.” Here’s our take on the lost art of recitation.
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“The year we killed our teacher”
What’s the only thing nicer than new fiction by Hilary Mantel? New fiction by Hilary Mantel that you can read for free. At the LRB, check out the entirety of her latest, “Kinsella in His Hole.”
Ernest Hemingway in Cuba
A restoration center has opened on Hemingway's property in Cuba, with holdings that include manuscripts, letters, and photographs.
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Grand Officier Yaşar Bey
Science Fiction’s Race Problem
How can science fiction writers invent aliens and entire planets but not include multifaceted characters of color in their fiction? At The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky discusses the genre’s equality problem and analyzes how race is viewed in everything from The Left Hand of Darkness to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. “When that future unthinkingly reproduces current inequities, it seems like both a missed opportunity and a failure of imagination.”
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Goodbye to Brazenhead
Recommended reading: Brian Patrick Eha‘s goodbye to Brazenhead Books, published in the New Yorker. Pair with J.T. Price‘s piece on the closing of Brazenhead for The Millions.
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A Cartoon Quixote
Well, Cervantes‘s body was just found, and there are some varying opinions about whether or not that’s a great thing for Spain and Spanish literature. What is almost definitely not a great thing for either: the pornographic Spanish Don Quixote cartoon from the seventies.