“’This splendid lady sandbagged me,’ Bloom said in a recent phone conversation, with the lofty, ungrudging admiration of an old general recalling an opposite number’s surprise attack at some long-ago battle. Flummoxed, he asked if they had not made an agreement. Ozick, Bloom recollects, said, ‘When you are dealing with the devil, you must be prepared to do anything!'” This New York Times Magazine profile of Cynthia Ozick makes it clear that, at 88, she shows no signs of slowing down.
Metaphor and Memory, Fame and Folly
Tuesday New Release Day: Tuil; Curtright; Young; Hall; Bukowski
New this week: The Age of Reinvention by Karine Tuil; The Burned Bridges of Ward, Nebraska by Eileen Curtright; Shock by Shock by Dean Young; The Selected Poems of Donald Hall; and On Cats by Charles Bukowski. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Cursing at Poets
At The Collagist, Kyle Beachy imagines the emperor Augustus saying to the poet Horace, “You and your kind are fucked!” “The Extent of Our Decline” is one of number of essays appearing in the collection I co-edited, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, coming in March from Soft Skull.
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Choose Your Highsmith!
The fine folks at Norton have made all of Patricia Highsmith’s books available in eBook format, and to celebrate the move, they’ve crafted a website dedicated to the author’s work. Choose Your Highsmith features a recommendation engine while will instantly pick a Highsmith book to match your selected criteria. There’s also a great video in which Alison Bechdel, Robert Weil (Highsmith’s editor at Norton), Joan Schenkar (Highsmith’s biographer), and Terry Castle share their love for the author of the Mr. Ripley series.
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at the utmost limits of writing itself
Christian Bök wonders about the future of conceptual poetry:”How do we write poems in a world where a spambot, like @horse_ebooks, gets to write all the great lines…?”
At The Table
The Table 4 Writers foundation, set up in the memory of the restauranteur Elaine Kaufman, recently chose the winners of its first round of $2,000 grants for writers. The winners will be honored March 7 at the New York Athletics Club, where Gay Talese will also be recognized with a lifetime achievement award.
From Augere to Author
“I’ve always loved that ‘author’ derives from the Latin augere, to increase.” At The Guardian, Eleanor Catton discusses her inspiration for The Luminaries, which involved two years of research. Here’s our review of the finished product.
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Goosebumps Turns Twenty
Two decades after the release of the first Goosebumps book, Jen Doll checks in with R. L. Stine.
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