Forget One Direction. Meet the little known boy band made up of John Cage, James Joyce, and Joey Ramone. Cage composed a song based on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake called “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs,” which Ramone later sang to haunting effect.
Finnegans Punk
Huck Finn, Improved
Cartoonist Ruben Bolling has identified some additional ways in which Huck Finn might be cleaned up for today's delicate readers.
A Debut
Maaza Mengiste, an old school chum, gets high praise from Claire Messud for her debut, the "extraordinary novel" Beneath the Lion's Gaze.
“This is the biography of a book.”
NPR has an excerpt from The Most Dangerous Book, Kevin Birmingham’s look at “the battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses.”
Jack Gilbert Dies at the Age of 87
Jack Gilbert died yesterday at the age of 87. Gilbert was the author of five standalone poetry collections—as well as additional collected volumes such as last March’s Collected Poems—and he was also a past winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. For The LA Times, John Penner reviews the poet’s legacy. Or, perhaps as fitting tribute to Gilbert’s life and work, better to hear his own final lines to the poem “Failing and Flying”: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
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Interview with Günter Grass
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