At Granta, revisit an essay from Seamus Heaney on trees and desire in literature. Pair with Trent Morris’s reflections after the poet’s passing.
Tree of Desire
Print the future.
Clive Thompson, of Wired and The New York Times Magazine, owns a digital copy of War and Peace but had his 16,000 words of notes and annotations printed and bound into a physical book. This, he says, may be the way of the future of reading.
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Romance Pioneer Vivian Stephens Gets Her Due
Vivian Stephens was an editor at Dell, an imprint of Doubleday, and was instrumental in founding the Romance Writers of America before she was pushed out.
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More Anticipated Books
The eagle-eyed Scott Esposito spots fall publication dates for volumes I and II of Murakami‘s IQ84…and for Helen DeWitt‘s new novel (!), Lightning Rods, due out from New Directions.
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Well-Heeled
A couple years ago, Robert Birnbaum interviewed Edith Pearlman for The Millions, asking why the highly regarded short story writer didn’t hit it big until recently. Now, in the Times, Laura van den Berg reads Pearlman’s book Honeydew, in a piece that nicely complements Steve Almond’s profile of the author. FYI, Laura van den Berg has written for us.
Julie Powell at Powell’s
The Julie Powell interview at Powell’s — on butchery and infidelity and self-disclosure.
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Late American Novel Love
The brief excerpt of The Late American Novel that appeared in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend was also the first appearance of “A Tiny New Culture Section With No Name,” part of the Magazine’s redesign. At the Magazine’s “behind-the-scenes” blog, Editor Adam Sternbergh talks about the tiny new section and has some very nice things to say about The Late American Novel as well.
Stevenson as Kurtz
“Since the middle of the 20th century, the academy has conditioned us to stay grounded within texts and steer clear of writers’ biographies for insights while biographers are often timid about the kind of playful speculation that we can undertake here in Slate. Readers, myself included, tend to wonder about the sources for characters the likes of Kurtz, Sherlock Holmes, and Jay Gatsby—larger-than-life, mysterious, existing on a kind of separate plane—and in doing so we are continuing the quests of the narrators who tried first (Marlow, Watson, and Carraway).” Matthew Pearl asks: was Robert Louis Stevenson the blueprint for Conrad‘s Kurtz?
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