It’s fitting in a strange way that the author of Being There is now the subject of an oddball novel-turned-biography. In the Times, Benjamin Markovits reads Jerome Charyn’s book Jerzy, which gives the life of Jerzy Kosinski a treatment he’d likely appreciate.
There Now
Buy Me A Drink
In what reads like someone’s answer to the “who would you invite to a literary dinner party” question, novelists Jeanette Winterson and Marlon James sat down for a fantastic conversation at a Miami hotel bar. James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker prize earlier this year.
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On the Mark
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Now nothing beneath the bad smelling sky
The Lorax has been stolen from the Dr. Suess memorial sculpture garden.
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Proto-Stalin
The world isn’t exactly wanting for character studies of Captain Ahab, but Chris Power manages to come up with a novel analysis of the character in this essay about the Moby-Dick antagonist. In Power’s telling, Ahab was valuable in part for what he told us about the 20th century — namely, he foreshadowed the dictators and despots to come. You could also read Hester Blum’s contribution to this essay about the best American novels.
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RIP Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco, Italian semiotician and author of works such as Theory of Semiotics and The Name of the Rose, has died at 84. His most famous work, The Name of the Rose, was adapted in a film starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater. Reflect on his life by revisiting Hillary Kelly’s review of Confessions of a Young Novelist.
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RIP Mark Strand
In memory of Mark Strand, who passed away on Saturday, the Paris Review Daily published a manuscript page from “A Piece of the Storm,” a poem that appeared in Strand’s collection A Blizzard of One. They also included links to several poems of his they published, as well as his Art of Poetry interview.
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His first step was to contact a real estate agent
In this week’s London Review of Books Elif Batuman has a great piece about Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, both the book and the place. It would pair well with our own Lydia Kiesling’s award-winning essay on the book from 2010.