“My idea of the ideal literary dinner party remains locking a book under my left wrist while conveying risotto to my mouth with my right at the kitchen table.” Stacy Schiff talks literary dinner parties and more in this week’s New York Times By the Book column. Schiff’s latest, The Witches: Salem, 1692, is out this week.
Deep, Hungry Gulps
Sun Ra’s True Birthday
Seth Colter Walls shares some Sun Ra tracks while commenting on the conclusion of his Arkestra’s tour in Lincoln Center. As always, any piece about the musician is enriched with a reading of Jake Adam York’s poem, “At Sun Ra’s Grave.”
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Leonard Cohen in Love
Leonard Cohen's love letters to Marianne Ihlen, which also described the writing and publication of Cohen's novels, recently sold for a whopping $876,000.
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Early Chaucer Manuscript Put Online for All to See
The “Hengwrt Chaucher,” one of the most significant early manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, has been put online for the entire world to see thanks to the efforts of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.
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Chocolate Tears
“I can tell you that it was his agent who thought it was a bad idea, when the book was first published, to have a black hero.” Roald Dahl‘s widow says that he intended for the eponymous hero of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to be “a little black boy.” Pair with our own Jacob Lambert‘s fond recollection of reading Dahl to his son.
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That Moment When
“I can still remember with complete clarity the way I felt when whatever it was came fluttering down into my hands that day 30 years ago on the grass behind the outfield fence at Jingu Stadium; and I recall just as clearly the warmth of the wounded pigeon I picked up in those same hands that spring afternoon a year later, near Sendagaya Elementary School. I always call up those sensations whenever I think about what it means to write a novel.” Haruki Murakami on “The Moment [He] Became a Novelist,” excerpted on Lit Hub from the new double edition of his first novels, Wind/Pinball.
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Centireading
“You can be acquaintances with many books, and friends with a few, but family with only one or two.” On rereading the same books – in this case Hamlet and The Inimitable Jeeves – 100 times.
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Before “Once Upon A Time”
George Dobbs explores the history of some common cliches for The Airship and makes an elegant argument for being aware of overused phrasing: “The worst fiction might never go beyond widely used tropes, but the best fiction starts with an awareness of them.” We agree, and also hope never to read “It was a dark and stormy night…” again.
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