Oscar Wilde: a “fatuous fool,” a “tenth-rate cad,” and an “unclean beast?” According to Henry James, all of the above.
When James met Wilde
1963 Was a Nice Year for Criticism
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Tuesday New Release Day: Malcolm, Percy, Drury, Barrett, Kertész
New! This! Week! Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm, Red Moon by Benjamin Percy, Pacific by Tom Drury, Love Is Power, or Something Like That by A. Igoni Barrett (read his piece at The Millions), and Dossier K, a memoir from Novel winner Imre Kertész.
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Moonlighting as Ian Fleming
It’s rare that you find someone as eclectic as William Boyd. Not only did the British writer’s new play (based on two of Chekhov’s short stories) debut in London this week, his upcoming novel will star none other than James Bond. (If you’re wondering, his friend Daniel Craig is not how he pictures the superspy.)
Real Life Rosebud
Last month, we got the gossip from Orson Welles. This month, the dirt is about him. His first film, Too Much Johnson, was recently rediscovered in Italy.
“Lyric Essay as Perversion”
“In the twenty-first century, the lyric essay at its worst is a utility or an app; at its best, it’s a cross-hatch of a genre in which things cross over; implicitly chiasmic, it’s a space in which incompatible discourses are allowed to intermingle; wherein poetry and prose create productive frictions, enabling a new, unnatural form, illegible and readable for the first time.” Mary Cappello writes about the lyric essay and Djuna Barnes.
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A Memory, Deconstructed
In Johns Hopkins Magazine, a remembrance of the Languages of Criticism and Sciences of Man Symposium, which brought together Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, among others. About Derrida, Professor Richard Macksey (whose library you may have seen) recalls: “I’m not sure we were clear about where this guy was going.”
Thank You for Your Submission
If you’re a writer planning to submit a novel manuscript to a literary agency, you might want to read these guidelines and recommendations, over at Electric Literature. Pair with Edan Lepucki’s Millions interview with her agent about publishing a first book.