Reviews and News:
Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Jill Bialosky is an executive editor at W. W. Norton and most recently the author of the literary memoir Poetry Will Save Your Life. She’s also a plagiarist according to poet and critic William Logan, who reviewed her book for Tourniquet Review.
V. S. Naipaul and Anthony Powell were friends, but after Powell died, Naipaul claimed he was “appalled” by Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time novels. He says the opposite in a letter to Powell in 1986, which was recently discovered by Powell’s biographer: “I’ve been reading The Acceptance World again,” Naipaul writes. “I cannot tell you the pleasure – much greater than before – it has given me. So original; so rich; so beguiling; so classical; so full of wisdom and gentleness and passion.”
Press will no longer read submissions that begin with “Dear Sirs” or list only male influences: “If either of these are included in a submission to Tramp, from now on Davis-Goff and Coen won’t read the manuscript. ‘This is a big deal for us – we’ve always kept the “slush pile” open lest we let any truly exciting piece of work pass us by,’ they wrote. But ‘it turns out that while overtly sexist authors send us a lot of work (a lot), they have never sent us anything we’ve wanted to publish. Not in over four years at Tramp, nor in our past publishing lives. But more importantly, people have to stop thinking there are no consequences to being sexist. So as of today, sexists need not apply.’” I haven’t thought there were “no consequences to being sexist” for a long time. That’s why I always address editors as “Dear Woodland Terrors and Rulers of the Air.”
René Girard’s intellectual vision: “In his mid-thirties, the late French thinker René Girard experienced an intellectual and religious conversion, which he credited with granting him the dense insight he would gradually unfold over a wide-ranging career as a literary critic, anthropologist, and Christian apologist. In Everything Came to Me at Once, cultural journalist Cynthia L. Haven gives us an elegant, accessible account of Girard’s transformation from skeptical nonbeliever to Catholic Christian.”
Richard Moe reviews Ron Chernow’s Grant: “Americans tend to stereotype their most notable presidents. Contemporary reporting and early biographies often lock in impressions, especially of failings, that persist for decades. Inevitably, though, a first-rate biographer challenges the conventional wisdom and redefines the man—so far, only men—in light of new information and a longer perspective. Thus some of our most eminent historians have given us fresh appraisals that have changed our understanding. Writers who have done so in single-volume biographies include David Donald (Lincoln), David McCullough (John Adams and Truman), Robert Dallek (Kennedy and, soon, Franklin Roosevelt), and Ron Chernow (Washington). Now Chernow has done it again with a landmark work on the much-maligned Ulysses S. Grant.”
Could John Banville please go back to being himself, A. N. Wilson asks.
Roman Polanski accused of rape again: “Renate Langer, a 61-year-old former German actress, has reported to the Swiss police that the film director Roman Polanski raped her at a house in Gstaad in February 1972, when she was 15. Ms. Langer is the fourth woman to publicly accuse Mr. Polanski of sexual assaulting her when she was a teenager.”
Essay of the Day:
In the Washington Post, Leah Libresco writes about why stricter gun control is a simplistic solution to a complex problem:
Photo: Newgrange Temple
Poem: David J. Rothman, “Kernels”
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