In the New York Times, a review of 2013 Year in Reading alum Olivia Laing’s new book, which delves into the alcoholism of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and six other famous writers. Among the biographical tidbits in the book: Tennessee Williams had a brandy Alexander every day when he lived in New Orleans.
With a Twist
Vote Knope
The most important news of 2013 so far: Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler is currently writing a memoir, to be published in fall of 2014.
Love Ever Write Often
“The way (Yeats) puts down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between.” The Paris Review has published a brief, fascinating letter written by Samuel Beckett to his aunt Cissie Sinclair containing an original poem and some positive criticism of the painter Jack B. Yeats. Top it off with this essay by Elizabeth Winkler about language, style, and translation–and how any of that might help to make sense of Beckett’s convoluted legacy.
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The US Navy will no longer write its internal communiques in all caps. Maybe they got tired of the sense that they were constantly shouting?
On Granta’s “Prescient” List
Recommended: Ellah Alfrey on selecting Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.
Hatchet Man
“Book reviews are another matter, because a bad review has the potential to be far more adversarial: one writer spending years on a book, one reviewer spending days reading it, and a lasting relationship being created between the two in print. Or, perhaps, a history between the two that lends the review a particular piquancy.” An exegesis of the good bad review.