“On the outside, she was immaculately poised, always elegantly dressed, with perfectly cut, silver hair; witty, brilliant company, properly opinionated, impatient with compromise or cant, what the book blurbs called ‘fiercely intelligent.’ But this came at a cost.” Jenny Diski‘s husband, the poet Ian Patterson, remembers his wife for The Guardian.
Jenny Diski In Memoriam
The Mad and Feral Works of Shirley Jackson
Emily Alford on the hazards of loneliness seen in Shirley Jackson's books and the ways recent film adaptations have missed the mark.
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David Mitchell’s Next Novel
In an interview about his Russian fans, Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell shares some details about his next book project. Put simply, “It’s about an immortal being that gets reincarnated as different men and women,” Mitchell says.
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Lovecraft’s Disappearing Act
A manuscript by H.P. Lovecraft has recently been re-discovered among a collection of magic memorabilia. The book was “an investigation of superstition through the ages” commissioned by Harry Houdini. (Maybe all of this magic had something to do with its disappearing act?)
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Finnegans Wake Hits Chinese Shelves
I don’t know how they managed to translate the thunderwords into Chinese, but if sales figures indicate success, they did a bang up job. Finnegans Wake is huge in China right now.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Murakami, Jobs, Nadas, Millet, Kahneman
It’s another huge week for new releases. Happy Murakami day! Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited 1Q84 is finally here – look for our review tomorrow, as is Walter Isaacson’s headline-making biography of Steve Jobs. Also out is another massive and hotly anticipated work in translation (1152 pages!), Hungarian Peter Nadas’s Parallel Stories. Lydia Millet has a new novel out, Ghost Lights, and Thinking, Fast and Slow is set to arrive from Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
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I’ve read (wolfed down) every single one of the (dozens/ hundreds of?) pieces JD wrote for the LRB … along with In Gratitude and The Sixties. Clear-eyed, honest, fearless and pretenses-shrivellingly witty from beginning to her literal end. I can think of thirty of her colleagues (and a few civilians), off the top of my head, I wish that we could trade for her back.
A link to JD in fine form:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n18/jenny-diski/it-wasnt-him-it-was-her