British novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard has died at the age of 90. She was famous for The Cazalet Chronicles and her literary love affairs with Kingsley Amis (one of her three husbands), Cecil Day-Lewis, and Arthur Koestler. Despite that her writing career spanned 60 years, she admitted that she found writing frightening in a recent interview. “You’ve got to be pretty nervous about the challenge, the blank page – anything could be on it, it could be crap or it could be wonderful.”
RIP Elizabeth Jane Howard
Literary Curveball
When most baseball players retire, they manage other teams, but Derek Jeter will manage a publishing imprint. The shortstop will open a publishing company, Jeter Publishing, in a partnership with Simon & Schuster. He expects to publish middle-grade fiction, children’s picture books, adult nonfiction, and books for children learning how to read. The first title should hit shelves in 2014. Maybe this could have been a good backup career for The Art of Fielding’s Henry Skrimshander.
Patron Half-Elephant
Francine Prose has an idiosyncratic theory that the Hindu god Ganesh is a vital part of her writing process. In a VQR essay, she explains that her portrait of the deity (which she purchased forty years ago at a bazaar in Mumbai) gives her a kind of confidence that goes beyond superstition. As support for this belief, she points out that Ganesh is known in some quarters as “the writer’s god.”
Famous in India
“His writings rarely make it to the US, and are resolutely for an Indian readership. They will win no prizes nor inspire dissertations. But for these reasons they represent the actuality of what many people in the world are reading today, outside of the newly sanctified category of the ‘global novel.’” Ulka Anjaria for Public Books on Chetan Bhagat, “possibly the most successful Indian English novelist ever” and largely unheard of in the west. For more fictional Desi perspectives, read Aditya Desai in our own pages on reading narratives of Indian women.
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Something Brewing on Twitter
Be sure you’re following @The_Millions on Twitter if you’re interested in entering our first ever sponsored giveaway of a special signed book. Look for details on Twitter later today.