Following last year’s Pulitzer Prize, which Donna Tartt won for her first novel in eleven years, it means something when a critic draws a favorable comparison between The Goldfinch and a new book. For Laura Miller, though, it’s a natural reaction to the latest from Sarah Waters, which seems poised to “scratch the same big-novel itch” as Tartt’s novel did last year. (FYI, Sarah Waters wrote a Year in Reading entry for The Millions.)
Eleven-Year Itch
Autobiographical Revisionism
“‘It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.’ The autobiography of the imagination then is an autobiography of our base desires, the things we haven’t done but have longed for. It is our fantasies, our secrets from which we curate by redaction how someone else sees us. It is an autobiography of instinct, desire.” Emilia Phillips on poetry as the autobiography of the imagination, over at Ploughshares.
A Campus Novel Classic
University Of Chicago Press has come out with a new edition of a somewhat forgotten classic in the campus novel genre. Randall Jarrell was a National Book Award-winning poet who wrote only one novel, Pictures from an Institution, about the fictional Benton College. The Kenyon Review published the opening of the novel in its Winter 1953 issue. It begins: “Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and spoken for the other.”
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Graduating from Hogwarts
J.K. Rowling will be releasing her first novel for adults on Little, Brown and Co. Details are set to come out later this year.
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“It was not intended to drive people crazy”
In a piece originally published in a 1913 edition of The Forerunner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman explains why she felt inspired to write “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
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Long-form Godfather
Ernest Hemingway, “the godfather of long-form” nonfiction? Richard Brody argues so in the New Yorker, citing Hemingway’s autobiographical, and wildly ambitious, The Green Hills of Africa.
Australian Literature: Starter Pack
Ever been curious about the literary scene down under? For the next week, you can grab seven Australian literary journals/collections as part of a pay-what-you-want eBook bundle courtesy of Tomely. The journals include Voiceworks, Kill Your Darlings, The Review of Australian Fiction, The Lifted Brow, Tincture, Sincere Forms of Flattery, and Willow Pattern. All of the journals will work on Kindles, iPads, Nooks, PCs, etc…
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