“He was surely the greatest literary editor there has ever been – brilliant, autocratic, endlessly curious and possessed of an extraordinary fund of knowledge about a vast range of subjects. True, he was not always easy to deal with, but when has the best ever been easy?” John Banville on the late Robert Silvers.
His Gift for Matching Books to Reviewers Was Uncanny
Readers Pick Favorite Indie Books
More from The Huffington Post's series on independent books: Readers' Favorites From Indie Publishers.
Thoughts of a Migraineur
“Stories are born unconsciously, but I think the writer determines whether the turn a book has taken is true or false through feeling, which is conscious. I shape my stories in this or that way because the story answers something that is emotionally rather than literally true for me.” At Full-Stop, Siri Hustvedt talks fiction with Tyler Malone.
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He Pleaded
“For the love of all things literary, please quit banning words like ‘said’ in your classrooms,” he howled. He demanded. He cackled. He barked. He spat. He bellowed.
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Howling Against Censorship
A San Francisco prisoner wanted to read werewolf erotica so badly that he took it to state court. The case has brought up problems with prison censorship and calls to mind Avi Steinberg’s memoir, Running the Books: Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (here's our review.)
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“Bleeding beautiful streams”
“It's easy to attribute genius to a dead man, a legendary philanderer, liar and self-mythologizer who died beautiful and curly-haired. But 'What About This' is an authentic outpouring like a warm river in full flood; you get swept off the bank and its languid physicality destroys you.” On Frank Stanford’s Collected Poems.
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Tintin Ruling
Good news for Tintinologists, if not guards of political correctness: Tintin in the Congo has been deemed "not racist" by a Belgian judicial adviser.